ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses only on the effort to make Russian history a tool for partisan argument in policymaking in the United States. The history of Russia has surely been no exception to the pattern. Russian historians have written their self-serving patriotic versions from medieval times to the present day, and foreign scholars, journalists, and statesmen have used both fact and fiction to make their case and have perpetuated a centuries-long legacy of forgeries and fabrications. Richard Pipes almost certainly is correct when he argues that Marxism-Leninism became the state ideology in Russia because the grosser features of that ideology, and the practices that they legitimized, fit so well a Russian national political character marked by cunning, brutality, and submissiveness. The uses and abuses to which the ostensible record of the Russian past can be put deserve a more comprehensive examination.
