THE LONG-STANDING ANIMOSITY and suspicion between Russia and the United States have reached such a frenzied pitch of late that the very idea of good relations has begun to feel impossible, almost ahistorical. You'd never know that, until the late-nineteenth century, the two countries were, in the words of the historian Norman Saul, more like "close friends in separate spheres," or that, thanks to a feeling of "mutual interest and common destiny," for the most part, "harmony and friendship prevailed." There are many nineteenth-century celebrations of this affinity on both sides. The Slavic nationalist Ivan Kireyevsky wrote, "Out of the whole world two peoples are not taking part in the universal somnolence; two peoples, young and fresh, are flourishing with hope: the United States of America and our fatherland." In an echo of Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles B. Boynton hoped that, together, America's "model . . . Christian Republic" and Russia's Christian monarchy would "bless, instruct, and elevate the people." If they could accomplish this, he prophesied, they would become "the two great powers of the future." Indeed, this sense that the two nations shared a "historic and divine mission" would inspire none other than Walt Whitman to write, "You Russians and we Americans;—our countries so distant, so unlike at first glance . . . and yet in certain features, and vastest ones, so resembling each other."

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