Mark Solovey. Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.

Sergei I. Zhuk. Address for correspondence: Department of History, Ball State University,

Muncie, IN 47306, USA. sizhuk@bsu.edu.

Contemporaries noted that the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union led to an intense “ideological offensive” when thousands of historians and social scientists in both countries became involved in area studies, including Soviet studies in the USA and American studies in the USSR. The common feature of this offensive from both sides of the Iron Curtain was an attempt to combine the techniques and insights of new historical research and “social sciences (intelligence on demographic and cultural trends, public opinion data, media manipulation) with advanced engineering (in command and control, weapons, transport) to manage, defuse or in some cases obliterate local challenges to superpower influence” (Simpson 1998:xvi; Engerman 2009). Simultaneously the Cold War’s area studies programs began training useful experts with broad knowledge of a particular region or nation’s language, culture, history, and political, judicial, and economic systems “in terms of mediation between the national self and the other, as liaisons or inter-cultural translators (often, of course, with specific geopolitical agendas to promote)” (Shamir 2003:377). But in contrast to the American side of the Cold War story, where the US government and various corporations funded college-based social science centers for area studies as early as the 1940s, Soviet social science centers for area studies were organized much later and only in the Moscow-based institutions of the USSR Academy of Sciences.