Russian language and culture has a long history in Western education. I'll discuss the American case, though Slavic and Soviet studies were important features of postwar European universities. France, in particular, benefitted from Russian refugees like Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Vladimir Weidle. While some Russian emigres settled in Germany--Nabokov lived in Berlin, for example--political and economic instability made France more attractive. It's also worth mentioning a large number of refugees fled to Shanghai.

While Russians and Slavs have been in America as intellectuals, workmen, and immigrants for as long as the country has existed--surely no one would discount the importance of Casimir Pulaski!--I would probably point to the late nineteenth century as the crystallization and institutionalization of 'Slavic Studies'. Leo Wiener, a Russian Jew, taught throughout the United States in the late 19th century before accepting a chair at Harvard in 1896 in Slavic literature. At the University of Chicago, Samuel Harper, the son of founder William Rainey Harper, studied in Petersburg during the 1905 Revolution and returned to teach Russian at the college. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Slavic programs contended with the Russian Revolution, pulled into two different directions: most emigrant Slavicists were sympathetic to the Whites, while many Western intellectuals were sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. This played out more deeply in Europe, though by the close of the 1930s few Westerners supported Stalin due to the Great Purge.

Yale, Michigan, and Princeton's Slavic programs coalesced in the 1940s, at the onset of the Cold War; throughout the 1950s and 1960s many more colleges established and promoted Russian studies. In Nabokov's Pnin, Timofey teaches Russian at an upstate New York liberal arts college, one whose students are "monstrously built farm boys and farm girls," and his lessons are forced to be “exercises in grammar brought out by the Head of a Slavic Department in a far greater college than Waindell—a venerable fraud whose Russian was a joke." This passage tells us quite a bit about Nabokov's perception of Russian in the academy, and shows us that smaller, regional colleges offered rough instruction in Russian by the mid-1950s. That language instruction misses the mark on culture and literature is not terribly surprising, but Russian was largely accessible for American college students.

Slavic (and Soviet) studies were supported by the US Government, indeed as 'a way to better understand perceived threats,' and Russian remains a Critical Language for the US State Department.