The Old Guard, the New Guard, and the People at the Gates: New Approaches to the Study of American History in the U.S.S.R.

A N international conference on New Approaches to the Study of American in the Soviet Union was held in Moscow on March I9-21, i99i.1 Sponsored by the Institute of General History and the Department of American History of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., the conference gathered about I30 historians: fourteen from the U. S., three from Germany, two from Great Britain, one from Czechoslovakia, the rest from the U.S.S.R.2 The conference featured many of the host country's most influential scholars, including N. N. Bolkhovitinov, I. P. Dement'ev, E. F. Iaz'kov, V. L. Mal'kov, G. N. Sevost'ianov, V. V. Sogrin, and V. A. Tishkov. It was, by design, a major event in the study of American history in the Soviet Union. The Soviet specialists who attended the conference brought with them a difficult history of their own. Rigid state controls have for many years allowed them to investigate only a narrow range of topics and have forced their conclusions to conform to an official one-sided 'image of the