“A Great President”: Alexander A. Troyanovsky’s Unpublished Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt

Abstract

This article examines previously unpublished typescripts by Alexander A. Troyanovsky, the first Soviet Ambassador to the United States (1933–1938), preserved in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). The corpus, comprising 661 manuscript pages, is devoted to the biography and political course of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and constitutes an important yet understudied source for the history of Soviet–American relations and Soviet interpretations of U.S. politics during and immediately after the Second World War. The first group of documents includes the article President Franklin Roosevelt, initially drafted by Troyanovsky in late 1942 for the literary journal Znamya. Subsequent revisions involved Konstantin A. Umansky, Troyanovsky’s successor as head of the Soviet diplomatic mission in Washington and an official of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (NKID). Umansky’s handwritten comments and editorial interventions provide valuable insight into the interaction between the author’s personal interpretation and the official Soviet line in wartime assessments of Roosevelt’s political leadership. They also help clarify the likely reasons for the journal’s refusal to publish the article.

The second group of materials consists of three archival files documenting the preparation of a book on Roosevelt for the biographical series The Lives of Remarkable People (ZhZL) in 1947–1948. These sources illuminate the editorial process and reveal divergences between the author’s perspective and the ideological expectations of the late Stalinist period.

The study situates these materials within the broader framework of Soviet historical policy and editorial control. It also reconstructs the probable chronological sequence of the six surviving versions of the Znamya typescript, as the archival pagination does not correspond to the actual stages of revision.