Аннотация

The Russian Famine of 1891-1892 caused the American society to organize the philanthropic movement, which struck eyewitnesses with its scale and generosity, though was taking place in the context of strengthening rivalries between the two countries and the sharp critique of the tsarist regime resulting in the decline of Russian-American friendship. The participants of this movement united irrespective of their social statuses, political views, or faith, used the methods of people diplomacy and obtained a real result. They did not intend to transplant their system of values to Russian soil and acted in the name of the ideas common to all mankind — «charity and gratitude». That is why these events occupy an absolutely unique place in the history of Russian-American relations. The creation of a full and authentic picture of the relief campaign on the base of a wide range of sources from the Russian and American repositories gives an opportunity to retrace not only the relations «state to state», but also «people to people», to reconstruct an image of Russia and Russians in American consciousness late in the 19th century.