Imagining Russia, Informing America: Samuel N. Harper, U.S. Public Opinion, and the Russian Revolution, 1916-1921 (2016)

Undergraduate: Griffin Creech

Faculty Advisor: Donald Raleigh
Department: History

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To historicize the foundations of American conceptions of Russia and the Soviet Union, I analyze and contextualize Samuel Northrup Harper (1882-1943), a founder of Russian studies in the United States, a professor at the University of Chicago, and America's leading and most trusted "Russia expert" during the Russian Revolution. Drawing on Harper's voluminous correspondence and personal papers, his memoirs, and a wide array of newspaper articles that he authored between 1916 and 1921, I argue that the highly selective master narrative of inevitable Russian progress that he spread widely to the American public, Washington bureaucrats, and the business community clashed with Russian political reality, particularly after the October (Bolshevik) Revolution. The constantly growing chasm between Harper's trusted and authoritative, yet subjective, views and the on-the-ground facts of Russian politics created a binary between the United States and Soviet Russia that pitted the two countries as polar opposites in the American mind. I show that Harper broadcasted this view widely and, thus, placed an intellectual straightjacket on American understandings of Russia for decades to come.