The author traces the intricate role of the United States diplomacy and a contingent of US Army within the context of many cataclysmic event of the Bolshevik revolution across Siberic and the far Eastern provinces of Russia. President Wilson initial policy of nonintervention which he declared on the eve of Civil war transformed into the imperia list design of different military cliques (including Japan) further confused the question of American search for “Russian dilemma”.

The author proceeds from the fact that from the first days of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the Woodrow Wilson administration, in various ways, under the guise of ostentatious goodwill, sought to take a leading role among those who offered Russia “help and assistance”. The US diplomatic services launched intensive reconnaissance and sabotage operations, spreading their influence and agents in the hottest spots of the country. These actions were combined with US armed intervention in Soviet Russia, were supported by local counterrevolution, and developed taking into account the presence of the Japanese military contingent in Siberia and the Far East, as well as Czechoslovak units from among former prisoners of war. As a result, by 1919 the United States was close to establishing something similar to the occupation regime in a number of places free of the “Reds” and their supporters.

Whether the Cold War between two superpowers and their respective allies was begun more or less as a replay of the closing campaigns of the World War II because of a massive Soviet invasion in the most of Western Europe or its birth we could see even before the advent of atomic weapons so powerfully demonstrated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The author demonstrates his understanding of the links between science (particularly nuclear physics), war and politics displayed at the very beginning of the Second World War. Based on recently unknown files in the former Soviet Union and the United States the fascinating history discloses how and why the Cold War between two superpowers gave many signs to be born during their hostilities against the common enemy as a result of a deep conflict of mentalities and the U.S. belief in a secure world if no nation after the WWII (except the USA) possessed nuclear weapons.

After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the U.S. – Soviet relations had reached one of their lowest points. The conduct of relationship in the contest of the nuclear weapons competition made most people to accept nuclear weapons as part of the natural order. For them the distant dangers of nuclear war became physical reality. In this climate the idea of thermonuclear weapons born in the USA transformed in military psychology into concept of nuclear deterrence. However the threat of nuclear destruction has caused the world wide movement that resists the temptation to commit mass murder which unconditionally could be called a suicide. The nuclear scientists with rear exception are convinced that the chances of developing an effective shield from the nuclear weapon are extremely remote. That is one of the main useful lessons from Cold War history.

During the World longest crisis — the Great Depression and the Second World War — in the USA one man stood nearest to the president Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was Harry L. Hopkins — trusted and loyal lieutenant of the president. From his work as a social worker in the New Deal through his most dangerous assignments during the war Hopkins demonstrated his best qualities — intellect and the art of creative diplomacy in negotiations with world leaders. By the fall of 1941 Hopkins became a key figure in US-Soviet relations. The main part of the article deals with the unknown Hopkins' letter to Stalin written by the special presidential envoy after his Moscow visit in July 1941.

After nearly one hundred years the Great War of 1914−1918 continues to affect the spiritual climate and international conditions under which our contemporary global society exists. Among the important sources which unleash the untold stories of that global conflict there are forgotten reminiscences of a few trained eyewitnesses of the war actions on the Eastern front where the most dramatic confrontations between the Russian Army and the armed forces of the Central Powers began in the first days of August 1914. The Robert R. McCormick's book «With the Russian Army» belong to this kind of once published and «lost» memoirs. The media magnate from Chicago was the only stranger to be invited to Russia and the Russian armies. His duty was manifold: to bring to America the information which «was denied to others», to see from within the military organization of a country geographically so like American size and so eminent in military experience and to feel in the proper sense a call to genuine Russian patriotism that could not be refused by Russian haters. As a matter of fact McCormick’s book published in Autumn 1915 was first in-depth research which explores the conditions that gave rise to the military conflagration of 1914−1918. The article and two appendixes tell us the unique story which reflects the authentic vision of the observer, who came in touch with the bloody massacre of world war.

The article and publication of some unknown documents from a private correspondence of American diplomats describe the substance of the polemics in modern Russian historiography of the genesis of the WWII. The author claims that the archival sources of special origin — personal diaries, letters of professional American diplomats to their colleagues, their highly confidential in governments' offices, newspapermen and family friends provide an upright overview of events in dramatic history of Europe in 1938−1939 which proves that the «traditional» school of historical research is more close in general to the correct interpretations of the international relations in the 1930s including the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The article brings to life a fulcrum moment in history of Russian-American relations in XX century which took place at the very time of the Great Depression and when it was recognized in full the seriousness of the Japanese threat in Asia and the reality of the Nazi menace in Europe. In Autumn 1933 the new president of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt fully appreciated the gravity of these development and initiated the recognition of the USSR. As a result of the negotiation with the Soviet foreign commissar M. Litvinov the establishment of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union was announced in November 16, 1933. Thus the sixteen years long, notorious non-recognition was closed and the path to more or less durable relationship between the two countries was opened. The article reveals not only the historical significance of the Roosevelt-Litvinov meeting as one of the first indications of the two states' marked solicitude for the precarious position of the peace-loving nations in the face of the Nazi menace and Japanese militarism. It was also a clear recognition of the Russia’s role in international relations and seriousness of Soviet offer to prevent attacks of the aggressors at the first sign. The efforts to stop the war failed but the ordeal of WWII proved definitely that the personal relationship of confidence between leaders and diplomats of the Big Three was entirely necessary and possible. M. Litvinov in his quality as a soviet envoy to Washington (1941−1943) was successful in gaining Roosevelt’s sympathy and involving him in talks concerning the postwar international security and world structure.

Based on rich material the article is the first comprehensive history of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) written by the Russian historian. It is a telling case study of the TVA creation in 1933 and its organizational evolution from the New Deal years to the final stage of the World War II. The author traces the central issue of the New Deal’s most dramatic project aimed to expand the governmental control over the economy and natural resources through public power, regional planning and new intellectual ideas for the transformation the New South area. President Roosevelt and the leading personalities in the board of directors of TVA (and among them David E. Lilienthal) had four principal goals. The first was to provide cheap electricity to homes and farms. The second was to provide jobs for unemployed. The third was to save from devastation the large territory of the depressed region in the South. And there was a fourth more ephemeral goal: that through public power, governmental ownership of some other services and publicly-owned distributorship could be created a model for a new and more prosperous form of society. Some contemporaries deeply believed that TVA was a big step to American sort of socialism.

From the ending of the Second World War in 1945 and his first close contacts with Democratic party leadership circles in the early 1950s through his years of participation in the Stevenson campaigns and Kennedy administration and up until his very last days in the beginning of 2000's the famous American historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. was always at the vital center of American politics and public life. For more than half a century the world known author of many fundamental books on American history and politics recorded his everyday experiences and reflections in journals that together form an intimate chronicle of life and events in the USA and outside world. The unique volume contains his candid impressions of events both in American domestic life and foreign affairs from the Berlin crisis and the Bay of Pigs to the fall of the Soviet Union and the contest of Bush vs. Gore during the election of 2000. The author of the article focuses on selected points of Schlesinger’s Journals which important for understanding the politics of the last decades.

From his entrance into public life before World War I through the years of Truman administration and up until his last days Felix Frankfurter, a prominent American lawyer and university professor with a profound concern to the whole sphere of human rights and social reform was always at the vital center of American politics. He reached a key position in American intellectual elite during the Great Depression in the 1930's and thanks to President Roosevelt’s promotion became an influential member of the US Supreme Court. He was known as a leading adviser to the New Deal administration. Moreover he was closely associated with «the Roosevelt’s family circle» and frequently took part in conversations with the president behind the closed doors of the White House. Frankfurter’s previously unpublished letter to a friend from April 24, 1945 describing the first reaction on Roosevelt’s death and analyzing the future of American politics gives a vivid reflection of the transitional time the American nation was to live though in the immediate postwar situation.

The present world economic crisis and its diverse influence on the U.S. economic, social and political life make every observer to look after the experience before 1929 when America was a society in which a small number of very rich people controlled a large share of the nation’s wealth and the next wretched years of the Great Depression and bewildering changes brought by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. Some economists think the New Deal imposed norms of relative equality in pay that persisted for more than 30 years, creating a broadly middleclass society. Those norms have not survived being replaced by an ethos of the superrich, the genuine core of the reaganism. Princeton economist Paul Krugman showed that the country’s economic disparities are as stark today as they were in the 1920's and that the effort devoted to maintaining that inequality leads directly to a deep poverty, underconsumption and in the end to the second edition of the Great Depression. He concludes his forecast with a grim warning: either democracy must be renewed or wealth and its political fellow-champions are likely to cement a new and less democratic regime. The Obama’s phenomen is considered by the author in the corresponding context.

The first part of the article focuses the reader on the source of global destabilization which arose from the major post-WW II geopolitical confrontation with the involvement of two superpowers, the USA and the USSR. The author shows how the US has used nuclear weapons to bolster its imperial ambitions and to suppress the Soviet influence. The main point is that ever since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US has deployed nuclear weapons as the centerpiece of its strategy of achieving and maintaining global hegemony. The study documents the way that American leaders have not been sparing of the threat to use nuclear weapon to achieve US foreign policy objectives. The author reminds that the doctrine of «full spectrum dominance», the cornerstone of which are technological supremacy and nuclear arms did not come into being with Harry S.Truman. He simply took over a traditional American global strategy to ensure that the US remained the dominant power for the long term if not forever.

In the second part of the article the author touches on the main points in the postwar United States' strategic thinking and behavior stimulated by their privileged position of atomic superiority. Hiroshima led to believe that the american organized West and the constant threat of using the nuclear weapon could deter the rising of the Soviet influence, address new long-term challenges from the Third World and maintain the global dominance of the western civilization. As might be seen from documentary material the major conflict between «hegemonic liberalism» and communism of different versions was the product not only of great colliding forces of history but also of the personalities and human inconstancy of those making the decisions, politicians, military men, nuclear scientists, ideologists and strategists. In this section of the article the author concentrates in particular on the Soviet-American technological competition moving through the new cycle beginning with the end of the american atomic monopoly and the appearance of a dangerous intention in U.S. foreign policy and military establishment to support different plans of preemptive nuclear war. As the author see in a big transfer in U.S.-Soviet relationship from the early nuclear decades to the present period, when leaders of both states can seriously discuss nuclear proliferation and abolition, was in large part due to the combination of «good diplomacy» provided by the approximate nuclear parity, the psychological turn after Sputnik launch and the fundamental change in the world structure.

The cold war may have begun, in a formal sense in the late 1940s but its multiformity (including pop-cultural contest), unexpectedness, intensity and longevity only make sense if we understand that it had far older sources. To ignore the prehistory of the cold war politics is to miss some of the most important aspects of the story. The author quite explicit about this: it is a typical error to see the origins of the cold war largely from the perspective of the confrontation between ideologies, between Leninist communism and the Western liberal values dates to 1917. The author of the article strongly believes that the new approach to the history of international relations in the XXth century demands to analyse the problem from a different angle — mainly paying attention to the «wars of position» in which both the pre-revolutionary Russian political elite and bolshevism in power in their perpetual search of security ever since the beginning of WWI, through the Revolution, the Civil War of 1917−1920, and the intermediate period between the world wars saw themselves as engaging against the more powerful and hostile West. In the first part of the article the author focuses on the U.S. diplomacy’s efforts to implement a policy designed to prevent the consolidation of the Soviet influence in Europe and Asia. In fact it was the «protocontainment» project supported by conservative politicians and «Russian experts» like Bullitt, Kelley, Henderson, Berle, Kennan.

In the second part of the article the author explores the hidden political struggle in the U.S. establishment for the alternative scenario to the Roosevelt’s Russian strategy on the eve of the WWII and until mid-1944. The U.S. ambassador in Japan Joseph Clark Grew ought to be mentioned as an influential senior member of the State department’s staff who proposed to use the «Japanese card» in order to out-game the Soviet Union and make it much more dependent on the U.S. good will and American power as the world stabilizer. His views were shared by W. Bullitt who among others proposed a bunch of measures to halt Soviet «expansionism». Ex-ambassador to the Soviet Union was the most inventive and persistent protagonist for U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union which could increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy had to operate. The idea of Pan-Europe including strong, militarized Germany was the keystone of his anticommunist containment project. The Cold War bacillus was originated also from the distrust among the Allies which arose together with the decision of Washington and London to develop secretly the atomic weapon for use against the axis powers and (as an effective means of preventive diplomacy) the Soviet Union. Thus the Cold War roots in the pre 2nd world war history helps to explain why this new long-term conflict emerged so quickly after the Great Alliance had won victory over its adversaries. It helps also to explain why the Kennan’s postulate from his «Long telegram» (1946) sounds like a final sentence: the USA «must continue to regard the Soviet Union as a rival, not a partner, in the political arena».

An American diplomat and historian George Kennan in his celebrated «Long Telegram» (1946), which made such a strong impact in American official circles warned against assuming the Soviet foreign policy as entirely based on nationalistic cynicism or imperial ambitions. The USSR, he wrote «is neither schematic nor adventuristic». Thus the mere logic (though not the only one) prompts us that Stalin saw in the Secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939 not only the means of achieving some intermediate aims in his drive for restoration of a full-scale Russian power and a step toward the direction which was governed by the idea of world revolution, but in the first place as the most necessary attempt in creation of a security belt on the whole perimeter of the Soviet western boundaries. Winston Churchill described these steps made in the war crisis atmosphere of 1939−1940 as motivated by rational Soviet feelings of deep insecurity in view of the Nazi move through eastwards and introduced the term «the Eastern bulwark» for designation of the territorial changes, occurred with the pushing westward of the Soviet boundaries in the second part of 1940 during the dramatic events which have followed the capitulation of France in June 1940. The documents from the U.S. diplomatic archives cited in the article underscore the validity of this conclusion.

The article, based on contemporary press analysis together with the two attached original documents from American manuscripts collections, tackles some fundamental questions related to the breakdown of the old world order, the Versailles system in the «Era of Munich». As the title indicates the author chooses to focus on the explanation for the collapse of fragile, shaky peace in September 1939 by presenting the testimony of the first-class witnesses whose worldviews and capacity to evaluate the great powers' performance in the prewar crisis situation and over the first stage of the Second World War nobody could call preconceived or unreliable. The essay gives the picture of the pre-WWII international structure in the process of disintegration and disarray through the eyes of the most experienced observers from the New York Times staff and long-standing expert on Russian foreign and domestic affairs Professor Samuel Harper from Chicago University. Since the spring 1917 professor Harper was assigned to a special mission — to provide the American policy makers with advanced analyses of «Russian phenomenon» with the goal of culling lessons and meeting challengers. For many years he was an unofficial adviser to the US State Department in the field of soviet-american relations. Harper was very successful in communicating the main features and peculiarities of Stalinist modernization of Russia. He was also acknowledged as a leading authority on post-Versailles Europe, gliding down to the greatest catastrophe in its history, which culminated in Nazi invasion against Poland, the capitulation of France and the demise of the balance of powers in Europe. The basic thesis of the article is that in the face of Hitler’s aggression the Western democracies (including the USA) by neglecting or underrating the new global role of the Soviet Union endangered not only the interests of their own but the world peace as a major priority. It took almost two years for London and Washington to recognize the Soviet Union’s potentially crucial role in the fight against fascism in cooperation with Hitler’s foes. But it was done reluctantly only after the collapse of France on June 1940 and coming up to a clear comprehension what was at stake.

Those, who believe that the present global hegemony of the United States emerged through a process of the disappearance of the bipolar world avert their eyes from many very important moments in early 20th Century US history, which compose the essence of the so-called «Progressive Era» (1890−1920). In the meantime the beginning of the Century which now went away still has much to tell us. Modern America was born in those early years. A land of family farms was eclipsed by a modern nation of giant corporations and world-wide financial institutions. America has become a world power. Of course americans sought to master the sweeping forces of change by what some of the scholars call «New interventionism». The United States had pictured itself as a moral exemplar to the world. The rapidly industrializing nation expanded its economic interest and began a policy of diplomatic and military intervention abroad. This new interventional activism moved beyond America’s traditional foreign policy of reacting to events. American policymakers — and among them such outstanding representatives of the political establishment as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson now sought to exert growing control over external forces of change. They used American influence and power to shape the international environment. The two major group of policymakers — adherents of Roosevelt’s Realpolitiks and wilsonian internationalists sought to protect the United States national interests and both believed that American political ideals and principals are in theory universally applicable. Following the predictions of expansionists they both argued that the United States should establish a benevolent global empire but the former emphasized power while the letter — ideology and morale. First emerging before WWI this debate has continued to the present with little change in the basic positions on either side.

Who are you, Mr. Kennan? Many contemporary scholars of the XX-th century diplomacy address this question to the well-known American diplomat, historian, policy analyst and expert on Soviet affairs, whose life way while manifesting the deep-rooted integrity always demonstrates alternative visions of the nation, international relations and prospects of the society in the world. George Frost Kennan made its own and prominent contribution to the explanation of the new worldwide role of the United States after World War II. Appeared to be influential among the «realists» who applied theory to diplomacy Kennan introduced his «containment of communism» concept as an antidote to legalistic approach to world affairs. Kennan urged in his famous cabled dispatches from Moscow and «Foreign Affairs» essay on the sources of Soviet behavior (1947) that relations with Soviet Union be placed entirely on a realistic and matter-of-fact basis, guided not by morality or altruism, but by the strengths and weakness of nations. Opposed as it was to moralism and Roosevelt’s policy of internationalism Kennan’s realism reflected not merely a concern for fact or reality but also a regard for elemental power as predominant force and influence. In proposing the principle of containment of the Soviet Union Kennan was taking for granted suppositions about America’s superior place not only in space but also in time. He won the political acknowledgment as an intellectual catalyst to the policy of confrontation while the Soviet Union, saying that the Kremlin was uncooperative and explaining why the United States had to check Soviet hostility and combativeness. But the author of the present essay, based upon some new primary source material, concentrates his attention mainly on the changing diplomat’s mentality as an indirect reflection of the dynamic historical process with his unsolved conflicts and unexpected new realities. Kennan who had once conceived of America exerting pressure to mellow or eliminate Soviet power as a totalitarian force and threat to democracy all over the world up to the beginning of the fiftieth felt a deep pessimism even causing him to doubt not only the constructive role of the American diplomacy in world affairs but the very capability for his country to solve domestic imperfections and propose to the rest of the world the new way of thinking which will provide a spiritual purpose for humanity in trouble.

The author’s key them is the American nation’s westward advance since the Revolution of 1775−1783 and the complex of ideas about America’s place in the world implying that Americans had to seize whatever sphere of the earth they could. The adherents of these ideas saw American overseas expansion as a revolution in world politics. They determined that frontier factor not only impelled the United States to move beyond its continental borders, but shaped the character of the people as well as their destiny. According to the doctrine they had to behave aggressively to build an empire. They needed to extend their business and trade into the world’s markets. They were required to enter a missionary struggle for the hearts of people and their freedom. Expansion of different kinds appeared as a necessity for Americans determined by scientific law.

For more than forty years the Soviet – American nuclear arms race broken out of the confrontation of the two superpowers of the postwar world dominated the world politics. However the atomic aspects of the Soviet domestic and foreign policy was shrouded in secrecy. Now after the disclosure of secret files it is possible to answer many questions that have intrigued scholars and the public for years and which are fundamentally important for the understanding of moving factors of the Soviet foreign policy in the first years of the Cold War, its motives and peculiarities. The main question is: what was the decisive factor in Stalin’s behaviour and what steps he took to counter U.S. atomic diplomacy. Based on a vast array of russian and american sources this original and formidable work of history discloses how and why the Kremlin proved to be able to mobilize the human factor and built the atomic bomb in a very short time.

The publication of some documents from the State Archives of the Russian Federation offers much fascinating material testifying to the deep sympathy between the outstanding representatives of the cultural elites and artistic communities of the USSR and USA during the World War II. This sympathy has arose from the identical understanding of the common danger — the world fashism, which brought the horrors and tremors of War to the peoples of both countries. These understanding and spiritual closeness found their embodiment in the short correspondence between the great soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the world famous conductor of the New York philharmonic orchestra Arturo Toscanini emerged from the genuine historical occasion in the history of the antifashist Resistance during WWII — the first performance of the Shostakovich’s symphony № 7 in the USA on 19 July 1942. It was a passionate call for solidarity of the two great nations in their struggle against the brown plague and for a better world.

As World War II was drawing to a close, U.S. policymakers, diplomats and publicists worried about the future of the international system but, even more than that, about the American national interest in each of its components. Given their country's overwhelming power, they now expected to refashion the world in America's image and establish "the American century". They intended to promote world peace, foster international stability, safeguard national security, perpetuate American power and prosperity in spite of the growing strength of the Soviet Union and its new role in the European affairs and geopolitical situation as a whole. The Hamilton Armstrong's memorandum for the Secretary of State (E.Stettinius), written on the eve of the Yalta conference, reveals the new global view of the American foreign policy ideologists, convinced in the superiority of the American values, as well as economic and military power.

Herewith is digest of confidential meeting of the Council on Forein Relations (USA, New York City), July, 15, 1940 with count Carlo Sforza’s report on the last days of the Third Republic in France. The principal point of the eyewitness review of the generally known Italian politician and diplomat sounded like that: the basic reason for the collapse of France in June 1940 is not German tank divisions, Stuka dive bombers or espionage. These weapons assisted in the defeat but they were not fundamental. The real explanation is psychological. In contrast with the First World War (1914—1918) which unified France, the beginning of World War II divided the nation into two camps. It is the existence of these two Frances, Carlo Sforza argues, which more than anything else explains the collapse of the postversailles France. Generally speaking the lower and middle classes regarded Germany as the great enemy and believed in fighting to the bitter end. On the contrary the upper classes were implacably opposed to any kind of war with Germany for they were hipnotized by one danger and only one: Bolshevism. «They would have welcomed a war with Russia any time». That was the most essential Sforza’s account concerning the higher priority interests of the French upper classes during the crucial years of 1939 and 1940. The tragedy of France told by Carlo Sforza brings us to a historical parallel with the breakup of the Soviet Union in the course of which «the Petain syndrome» played almost the decisive role.