"Friends in Peace and War": The Russian Navy's Landmark Visit to Civil War San Francisco Book

This is a book I very much wanted to like. The thesis is on a topic (relations between Tsarist Russia and the American Union during the Civil War) which is both interesting and underexplored. And there are stories recounted here which are very much worth telling: the intrigues and fears surrounding Confederate activities off the West Coast; the six Russian sailors under the command of Admiral Popov who died saving San Francisco from a possibly devastating fire; the ball commemorating Russian-American friendship; the establishment of San Francisco's first Russian Orthodox community; the establishment of an American political presence in Alaska. There's even a touching sketch of a love story about how the Finnish-Russian Lieutenant Aleksandr Etolen took English lessons from Katherine Selfridge, the daughter of American Commodore Selfridge, fell in love with her, and came back to marry her six years later. But the book was frustrating in part because Dr. Kroll was not particularly successful in weaving these threads together into a single cogent theme, or organising them in a way which drives home a broader point. That Tsarist Russia and the United States shared a particularly deep friendship that at the time seemed to be a lasting one is a point of interest, and there are intriguing hints about how it came about, and the geopolitical and ideological confluences which sustained it. But these are more touched on and glanced over than explored in-depth.

Part of the problem is that it is unclear what kind of history Dr. Kroll wanted this to be: a sweeping diplomatic history, a military history of the American navy in the Pacific during the Civil War or a local case study of San Francisco's Civil War experience. He could have taken it in any of the above three directions and made an incredibly strong work of popular history, but the end result seems to be rather a chronological jumble of all of the above themes. And again, this can get incredibly frustrating at times when one paragraph is about a fascinating story of Russian-American camaraderie, friendship, love and heroism, and the next is primarily a bone-dry description of the outfitting of a military vessel or the munitions present in a land fortification. Yes, I suppose I'm making my biases fairly clear in this instance; but it is generally enough to make a broad point about how underequipped and vulnerable the San Franciscans felt in the middle war years.

In addition, the book is incredibly poorly-edited. Normally I wouldn't dwell on this too much, because it's hardly ever the sole fault of the author, but the misspellings and typographical errors in this volume got to be incredibly distracting. I would suggest that the book needs a second edition that both clarifies the thesis, draws the main points of the thesis together, and cleans up a lot of the typos. It's a book with a lot of potential, but it doesn't read like a finished work.