| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development. By David C. Engerman. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. x, 399 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-674-01151-1.)
The Brandeis University historian David C. Engerman adapts his title from Alexander Herzen's From the Other Shore (1850). That series of articles by the exiled Russian radical offers an argument against forfeiting the existing generation for a romantic posterity. Engerman admires Herzen's undertaking because he expressed a vision of social transformation that would benefit each generation, including the present one.... his writings expressed a determination to understand nations and peoples historically. (p. 1)	1
According to Engerman, the leading United States specialists on Russia and, after 1917, the Soviet Union, increasingly were an institutional elite guilty of deviating from this judicious perspective as they diversely negotiated the claims of universalism and particularism. Journalists, academics, and diplomats from 1870 to 1940 too often comprehended Russian and Soviet development in conformity with shallow notions of national character and ancient stereotypes of rural backwardness marked by a peculiar lethargy that could only be discharged by force. A long-term fixation on rapid urban industrialization as the key to a preferred modernization culminated in an egregious blind spot in news coverage of the horrific famine in 1932–1933.	. . .

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