University Press of Kansas Logo

Distant Friends

The United States and Russia, 1763-1867

Norman E. Saul

xii, 448 pages, 20 photographs, 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-0438-8, $40.00

WINNER OF THE BYRON CALDWELL SMITH AWARD

Book Cover ImageWe began as friends. Then followed nearly a century of suspicion and hostility. Now, thanks to glasnost and a thaw in the Cold War, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union have nearly come full circle--we're almost friends again.

In the initial volume of a three-volume series, historian Norman Saul presents the first comprehensive survey of early Russian-American relations by an American scholar. Drawing upon secondary and documentary publications as well as archival materials from the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain, he reveals a wealth of new detail about contacts between the two countries between the American Revolutionary War and the purchase of Alaska in 1867. By weaving personal experiences into analysis of the basic trends, Saul provides a fuller understanding of Soviet-American experience.

His conclusion? That the early relationships--diplomatic, cultural, scientific, economic, and personal--between the two countries were more extensive than had been reported before, more important, and more congenial.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the U.S. and Russia had a lot in common, Saul notes, and many of those similarities persist today. Both countries, in part because of geographic size, faced problems in developing their natural resources. Both countries were economically dependent on systems of forced labor--slavery in the U.S. and serfdom in Russia. Reform resulted in freedom without land for American slaves, and land without freedom for the serfs. Then, as now, Russia looked to the U.S. for help with technology.

Saul shows that differences also persist. The United States was geographically isolated and developed in relative peace, while Russia developed within the reach of the European powers and, consequently, worried more about defense. As is still the case, Russian government seemed apallingly autocratic to those whose rights were guaranteed by the U.S. constitution, and deal-making between citizens of the two countries was hampered by the Russians' belief that Americans were materialistic and deceitful, and by Americans' notion that Russians were slow, bureaucratic, and expected to be bribed.

At a time when United States-Soviet relations have taken yet another dramatic turn, it is more important than ever to trace--and to understand--the history of the relationship of these two countries. As Saul shows clearly, parallel developments of the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth centuries in some ways foreshadow parallel development into the two superpowers in the mid twentieth.

"This long-awaited and keenly-anticipated book will confirm Norman Saul's reputation as the pre-eminent American historian of Russian–American relations prior to the Russian Revolution. . . . Together with its forthcoming companion volumes, it will be the standard work on this subject for years to come."--John Lewis Gaddis, author of The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War and Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History

"This is the fullest account available of Russian–American relations from the beginning through the purchase of Alaska. . . . Exhaustive and judicious. . . . A remarkable contribution."--Alexander Dallin, author of The Soviet Union at the United Nations and Black Box: KAL 007 and the Superpowers

"Edifying and enjoyable. . . . Both good history and good reading."--Raymond L. Garthoff, author of Detente and Confrontation

"Complements, updates, and synthesizes very effectively all the existing literature on the subject."--Allison Blakely, author of Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian History and Thought

"This is a publication of great importance in American and Russian history. One is tempted to say it is the classic reference for U.S.-Russian relations between the 1770s and the late 1860s. It is encyclopedic. It will simply become the standard reference from which every other scholar studying the subject will have to begin."--Walter LaFeber, author of The American Age: U.S. Foreign Policy Abroad and at Home Since 1750 and Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America

NORMAN SAUL is professor of history and Russian and East European Studies at the University of Kansas and author of War and Revolution: The United States and Russia, 1914-1921; Concord and Conflict: The United States and Russia, 1867–1914; Russia and The Mediterranean, 1797-1807; and Sailors in Revolt: The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917.