Choi Chatterjee is Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. She is the author of Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910-1939 (2002), and co-author of the volume, The Twentieth Century: A Retrospective (2002). She is currently working on a history of American Communist women and their formative experiences in the Soviet Union.

Beth Holmgren is Professor and Chair of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University. She has recently published a cultural biography of the great nineteenth-century Polish/American actress, Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America (2012). She is currently working on a history of the interwar literary cabaret in Poland.

Introduction. Choi Chatterjee, Beth Holmgren 1. Studying Our Nearest Oriental Neighbor: American Scholars and Late Imperial Russia David C. Engerman Part I: Inside Stories: Utopia, Bohemia, Crucible 2. Hallie Flanagan and the Soviet Union: New Heaven, New Earth, New Theater Lynn Mally 3. Kennan Encounters Russia, 1933-37 Frank Costigliola 4. Constructing a Cold War Epic: Harrison Salisbury and the Siege of Leningrad Lisa A. Kirschenbaum Part II: Our Popular Russian Romance 5. The Russian Romance in American Popular Culture, 1890-1939 Choi Chatterjee 6. Russia on Their Mind: How Hollywood Pictured the Soviet Front Beth Holmgren Part III: Conspicuous Consumers: Ambassadors and Donors 7. Another Mission to Moscow: Ida Rosenthal and Consumer Dreams Emily S. Rosenberg 8. The Moscow Correspondents, Soviet Human Rights Activists, and the Problem of the Western Gift Barbara Walker Part IV: Americans in the Russian Mirror 9. Interviewing Village Mothers--With Help from My Friends David L. Ransel 10. Fear, Affluence, and the Great Plutonium Extravaganza Kate Brown Part V: Living Across Cultures 11. An Interview with Marina Goldovskaya, a "Russian-American" Filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya with Choi Chatterjee and Beth Holmgren 12. The Search for What Might be True: Thoughts from Inside an Era of Change John Freedman Notes Notes on Contributors Index

Americans Experience Russia analyzes how American scholars, journalists, and artists experienced and interpreted Russia/the Soviet Union over the last century. It critically engages with postcolonial theories which posit that a self-valorizing, unmediated west dictated the colonial encounter. In examining the fiction, film, journalism, treatises, and histories Americans produced out of their 'Russian experience,' this volume closely analyzes these texts, locates them in their sociopolitical context, and gauges how their producers' profession, politics, gender, class, and interaction with native Russian interpreters conditioned their authored responses to Russian/Soviet reality.