| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The American Mission and the "Evil Empire": The Crusade for a "Free Russia" since 1881. By David S. Foglesong. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. x, 352 pp. Cloth, $85.00, ISBN 978-0-521-85590-7. Paper, $34.99, ISBN 978-0-521-67183-5.)

David S. Foglesong has written an encompassing narrative of Americans projecting their political value system on Russia, which might be called a study in American exceptionalism transposed to Russia. His sources are copious and the research extensive. The book's theme is, in essence, the attempt to transpose the "city on the hill" missionary work to Christianize and democratize the poor benighted Russian heathens. Foglesong tells that story quite thoroughly. Beginning with the attempt by the traveler and writer George Kennan to bring "reform" to tsarist Russia in the late nineteenth century and continuing through such later observers and movers as George F. Kennan, Foglesong traces a long path of successive raised hopes and bitter disappointments in Americans' expectations of an expanded influence on Russian development. He exposes the successes and failures of numerous presidents and diplomats with clarity and makes a fine point of the sharp differences in approach of such leaders as Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

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