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Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts. By David C. Engerman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xii, 459 pp. $34.95, isbn 978-0-19-532486-0.)
David C. Engerman's splendid book is a chronide of Soviet studies in the United States - its origins in World War II, its dramatic rise in the 1950s and 1960s, its stagnation in the 1970s, and its fractious final phase in the 1980s, when analysts on the Left and Right debated the nature of the Soviet system and, almost to a person, failed to anticipate its imminent collapse. It is a fascinating story, filled with colorfid, outsized personalities from various walks of life, and Engerman tells it well, in dear and economical prose and with a keen eye for the telling anecdote and vivid quote. He is also authoritative in his findings, having based his study on deep research in a range...