Encyclopedia of Russian History

The coincidence of a liberal, reformist government in Russia under Alexander II (1856-1881) and the U.S. Civil War formed an even closer bond, resulting in Russian naval squadrons visiting New York and San Francisco in 1863 to demonstrate support for the North. Their presence may have been influential in restraining France and Britain from more overt support of the Confederacy, thus ensuring Union victory. The aftermath witnessed several much-publicized exchange visits that included that of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gus-tavus Fox to Russia in 1866 and Grand Duke Alexis hunting buffalo in Nebraska and Colorado with George Armstrong Custer and William (Buffalo Bill) Cody in early 1872. These visits may have marked the peak of the unlikely friendship of autocratic Russia with republican America.

In the cultural arena there were at first relatively few direct contacts, despite a Russian fascination with the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Later in the century, Americans reciprocated with an appreciation of Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dos-toyevsky, and especially Leo Tolstoy, whose works produced in America a veritable craze for things Russian. This was accompanied by renewed Russian interest in American life as portrayed in stories of Mark Twain and the art of Frederic Remington, among others. Russia’s amerikanizm (obsession with American models for society and technological advance) was demonstrated especially by the adoption of Hiram Berdan’s rifle design for the Russian army and the considerable Russian presence at the Chicago World’s Fair (Columbian Exposition) in 1893.

American companies, primarily Singer and International Harvester, served the Russian quest for modernization in exchange for monopolistic rights and independent factories. By 1914 they numbered among the very largest private concerns in Russia, employing more than thirty thousand each. New York Life Insurance Company, dominating that sector in Russia, was reported to be the largest holder of Russian stocks. Westinghouse and the Crane (plumbing) businesses partnered to produce air brakes for the Trans-Siberian Railroad, launched in 1892. A result was that the manager of the RussENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev confer during a walkabout in Red Square, near St. Basil’s Cathedral, May 31,

1998. ASSOCIATED PRESS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.

ian enterprise, Charles R. Crane, became devoted to Russian culture and religion and promoted its appreciation in America by sponsoring lectures by the liberal historian Pavel Milyukov, endowing a chair at the University of Chicago, and financing tours of Russian choirs and other artistic groups through the United States. His advocacy of preserving the true Russian culture would continue through the Russian Revolution, civil war, and purges.

By the 1880s two major issues clouded the earlier harmony in relations. One was the Russian arrest and prosecution of political dissenters after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 and the resulting Siberian exile system that George Kennan so eloquently depicted in a series of articles for American Mercury in the 1880s. This elicited considerable American sympathy for those Russians

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who were challenging the autocratic regime for their democratic and socialist causes and suffering at the hand of a police state. The other was Russian policy toward its Jewish population, which required the Jews to abide by strict limitations on activities, to emigrate, or to convert to another, more acceptable religion. Encouraged by American immigrant Jewish aid societies, many Russian Jews departed for the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These factors not only produced a generally negative opinion of religious and political rights in Russia, but also resulted in the abrogation of the Commercial Treaty of 1832. The agreement had stipulated that Americans would be assured the same rights in Russia as Russians, but Russia took this to mean that American Jews could only have the same restricted rights as Russian Jews. The Russian effort to alleviate the problem by denying entry visas to American Jews on grounds of religion only aggravated the situation. After considerable debate, the U.S. Senate formally abrogated the treaty in 1912, but this had practically no effect on commerce between the two countries.