ABSTRACT
As luck would have it, the next period-the 1880s and ‘90s-in the history of the Russo-American relations whose evolution we continue to trace in this chapter began with the almost contemporaneous occurrence of tragic events in both countries that on the surface underscored the similarities between their separate “manifest destinies”. On March 14, 1881, American citizens awoke to startling news printed on the front page of all major contemporary newspapers: the day before, Russia’s “Czar Liberator” Alexander II had been assassinated by members of the terrorist organization “Narodnaia volia” [People’s will]. The U.S.’ immediate offi cial reaction was one of deepest sympathy for the emancipator and his family. Unoffi cially, too, most Americans agreed that, as Andrew Dickson White (a minister to Germany at the time) put it, “the man deserved a better fate”.2 The similarities between Alexander II’s violent end and that of Abraham Lincoln, America’s own great emancipator, were immediately picked up on and developed in numerous articles in the U.S. press. And if reviving painful memories from sixteen years before3 might have provided an insuffi cient incentive for some to commiserate with the grief of the Other, the assassination of the current American president, James A. Garfi eld, only six months later, on September 19 of that fateful year, certainly emphasizedfor the Russian and American peoples alike-the obvious commonalities in their most recent experiences.
