Distant Friends

In the initial volume of a three-volume study, historian Norman Saul presents a comprehensive survey of early Russian-American relations. Drawing upon more than two decades of research in secondary and documentary publications as well as archival materials from the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain, he reveals new details about contacts between the two countries between the American Revolutionary War and the purchase of Alaska in 1867. His conclusion is 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 18th and 19th centuries the US 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 resource. Both countries were economically dependent on systems of forced labour - slavery in the US 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 US 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 defence. As is still the case, the Russian goverment seemed autocratic to those whose rights were guaranteed by the US Constitution, and deal-making between citizens of the two countries was hampered by the Russian belief that Americans were materialistic and deceitful and by the American 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, parallel developments of the late 18th to mid 19th centuries in some ways foreshadow parallel developments into the two superpowers in the mid 20th.