ABSTRACT
The connections between political power and research about the Middle East seem universally accepted and acknowledged in the United States, in part because the field has been sensitized to questions of knowledge and power raised by Edward Said's Orientalism, which has transformed the field, but most importantly because so much of the research funding during the last sixty years has come directly from US government sources. In the very distant-seeming field of Russian history, particularly in its sub-field interested in questions of Russia's relationship with the East, two recent works by Vera Tolz and David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye have taken a quite contrary position. Other well-known American travelers to the Holy Land, such as John Lloyd Stephens, William McClure Thomson, and Mark Twain, also composed best-selling travelogues that depicted the region through crude and often derogatory caricatures. The directive to spread the October Revolution abroad created another group of scholars of the contemporary East inside the USSR.
