The selections in this issue of the Russian Social Science Review offer snapshots of the Russian–American relationship over time. In “Russia’s Emperors and Russian America,” historian Andrei V. Grinev writes that the early-nineteenth-century Russian settlements that dotted the west coast of North America from Alaska to northern California until 1867, when Alaska was sold to the United States, were of only intermittent interest to the tsars, who were usually preoccupied with matters closer to their vast continental home. Next, psychologist Larisa Yushkova presents a comparative analysis of Russian university students’ perceptions of America and Americans, Russia and Russians, on the basis of free-association surveys conducted by S.G. Ter-Minasova in 1992, 1995, and 1998, and by the author in 2015. The results are thought-provoking. Finally, sociologist Lev Gudkov, who succeeded the late Yuri Levada as director of the eponymous independent sociological research center, analyzes the “Structure and Functions of Russian Anti-Americanism” during what he terms the “mobilization phase” of 2012–2015. Gudkov argues that “Anti-Americanism intensifies when there is a crisis of legitimacy of the political system of domination, since it is an extremely effective way to consolidate the population around the government.” Readers with further interest in these topics may wish to look for “The Western World in Soviet and Russian Cinema (1946–2016),” by A.V. Fedorov, which appears in English translation in the journal Russian Education and Society, vol. 59, nos. 7–9.
—P.A.K.