Kremlinology is the study and analysis of the politics and policies of the Soviet Union while Sovietology is the study of politics and policies of both the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

and former

communist state A communist state, also known as a Marxist–Leninist state, is a one-party state that is administered and governed by a communist party guided by Marxism–Leninism. Marxism–Leninism was the state ideology of the Soviet Union, the Comi ...

s more generally. These two terms were synonymous until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In popular culture, the term is sometimes used to mean any attempt to understand a secretive organization or process, such as plans for upcoming products or events, by interpreting indirect clues. The founder of Kremlinology is considered to be

Alexander Zinoviev Alexander Alexandrovich Zinoviev ( Russian: Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Зино́вьев; October 29, 1922 – May 10, 2006) was a Soviet philosopher, writer, sociologist, and journalist. Coming from a poor peasant fami ...

. The term is named after the Kremlin, the seat of the former Soviet government. Kremlinologist refers to academic, media, and commentary experts who specialize in the study of Kremlinology. The term is sometimes sweepingly used to describe Western scholars who specialized in Russian law, although the correct term is simply ''Russian law'' scholar. Sovietologists or Kremlinologists should also be distinguished from transitologists, scholars who study legal, economic and social transitions from communism to market capitalism.

Historiography

Academic Sovietology after

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

and during the Cold War was dominated by the "totalitarian model" of the

, stressing the absolute nature of

Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...

's power. The "totalitarian model" was first outlined in the 1950s by political scientist

Carl Joachim Friedrich Carl Joachim Friedrich (; ; June 5, 1901 – September 19, 1984) was a German-American professor and political theorist. He taught alternately at Harvard and Heidelberg until his retirement in 1971. His writings on state and constitutional theory ...

, who argued that the Soviet Union and other

Communist state A communist state, also known as a Marxist–Leninist state, is a one-party state that is administered and governed by a communist party guided by Marxism–Leninism. Marxism–Leninism was the state ideology of the Soviet Union, the Comi ...

s were

totalitarian Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and reg ...

systems, with the

personality cult A cult of personality, or a cult of the leader, Mudde, Cas and Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira (2017) ''Populism: A Very Short Introduction''. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 63. is the result of an effort which is made to create an id ...

and almost unlimited powers of the "great leader" such as Stalin. The "revisionist school" beginning in the 1960s focused on relatively autonomous institutions which might influence policy at the higher level. Matt Lenoe describes the "revisionist school" as representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong. They tended to be interested in social history and to argue that the Communist Party leadership had had to adjust to social forces." These "revisionist school" historians such as

J. Arch Getty John Archibald Getty III (born November 30, 1950) is an American historian and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who specializes in the history of Russia and the history of the Soviet Union. Life and career Getty was ...

and

Lynne Viola Lynne Viola is a scholar on the Soviet Union. She is a professor at the University of Toronto and has written four books and 30 articles. Early life Raised in Nutley, New Jersey, she graduated from Nutley High School in 1973. Viola graduated f ...

challenged the "totalitarian model" approach to Soviet history and were most active in the Soviet archives.

Techniques

During the Cold War, lack of reliable information about the country forced Western analysts to "read between the lines" and to use the tiniest tidbits, such as the removal of portraits, the rearranging of chairs, positions at the reviewing stand for parades in

Red Square Red Square ( rus, Красная площадь, Krasnaya ploshchad', ˈkrasnəjə ˈploɕːətʲ) is one of the oldest and largest squares in Moscow, the capital of Russia. Owing to its historical significance and the adjacent historical build ...

, the choice of capital or small initial letters in phrases such as "First Secretary", the arrangement of articles on the pages of the party newspaper ''

Pravda ''Pravda'' ( rus, Правда, p=ˈpravdə, a=Ru-правда.ogg, "Truth") is a Russian broadsheet newspaper, and was the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when it was one of the most influential papers in the ...

'' and other indirect signs to try to understand what was happening in internal Soviet politics. To study the relations between Communist fraternal states, Kremlinologists compared the statements issued by the respective national

Communist parties A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of '' The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. ...

, looking for omissions and discrepancies in the ordering of objectives. The description of state visits in the Communist press were also scrutinized, as well as the degree of

hospitality Hospitality is the relationship between a guest and a host, wherein the host receives the guest with some amount of goodwill, including the reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers. Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt describes ...

lent to dignitaries. Kremlinology also emphasized

ritual A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, actions, or objects, performed according to a set sequence. Rituals may be prescribed by the traditions of a community, including a religious community. Rituals are characterized ...

, in that it noticed and ascribed meaning to the unusual absence of a policy statement on a certain anniversary or holiday. In the German language, such attempts acquired the somewhat derisive name "Kreml-Astrologie" (Kremlin

Astrology Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Di ...

), hinting at the fact that its results were often vague and inconclusive, if not outright wrong.

After the Cold War

The term ''Kremlinology'' is still in use in application to the study of decision-making processes in the politics of the Russian Federation. In popular culture, the term is sometimes used to mean any attempt to understand a secretive organization or process, such as plans for upcoming products or events, by interpreting indirect clues. While the Soviet Union no longer exists, other secretive states still do, such as

North Korea North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu (Amnok) and T ...

, for which Kremlinology-like approaches are still used by the Western media. Such study is sometimes called "Pyongyangology", after the country's capital

Pyongyang Pyongyang (, , ) is the capital and largest city of North Korea, where it is known as the "Capital of the Revolution". Pyongyang is located on the Taedong River about upstream from its mouth on the Yellow Sea. According to the 2008 populat ...

Notable Kremlinologists and Sovietologists

, the founder of Sovietology (Kremlinology) *

Anne Applebaum Anne Elizabeth Applebaum (born July 25, 1964) is an American journalist and historian. She has written extensively about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She has worked at ''The Econ ...

* John Barron, author of ''The KGB Today'' * Mark R. Beissinger *

Zbigniew Brzezinski Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński ( , ; March 28, 1928 – May 26, 2017), or Zbig, was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was President Jimmy Carter' ...

Hélène Carrère d'Encausse Hélène Carrère d'Encausse (; born Hélène Zourabichvili; 6 July 1929) is a French political historian of Georgian origin, specializing in Russian history. Since 1999, she has served as the Perpetual Secretary of the Académie française, to ...

Carey Cavanaugh Carey Edward Cavanaugh (born January 1955) is a former United States, U.S. Ambassador/peace mediator who is currently a professor of diplomacy at the University of Kentucky and chairman of International Alert, a London-based independent peacebuildi ...

Walter Clemens Walter Carl Clemens, Jr. (born April 6, 1933) is an American political scientist best known for advancing complexity science as an approach to the study of international relations and comparative politics. He has been active in the analysis of comp ...

* Stephen F. Cohen *

Robert Conquest George Robert Acworth Conquest (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British historian and poet. A long-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Conquest was most notable for his work on the Soviet Union. His books ...

* Michael David-Fox * R. W. Davies *

Evgeny Dobrenko Evgeny Dobrenko (born 4 April 1962) is a Russian-American historian. Born in Odessa, he moved to Moscow and worked at Moscow State University and the Russian State University of Humanities. He emigrated to the US and worked at Duke University, Sta ...

* Marshall Goldman * Donald E. Graves * Jonathan Haslam * William G. Hyland *

George F. Kennan George Frost Kennan (February 16, 1904 – March 17, 2005) was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly hist ...

Khurshid Kasuri Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri (Urdu: خورشيد محمود قصورى; born 18 June 1941), is a Pakistani politician and writer who served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan between November 2002 until November 2007. He is the Senior Ad ...

Michael Kort Michael Kort (born 1944) is an American historian, academic, and author who studies and has written extensively about the history of the Soviet Union. He teaches at Boston University. Biography Michael Kort was born in 1944. He received a B.A. in h ...

Wolfgang Leonhard Wolfgang Leonhard (16 April 1921 – 17 August 2014) was a German political author and historian of the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic and Communism. A German Communist whose family had fled Hitler's Germany and who was educated i ...

* Moshe Lewin * William Mandel * Jack F. Matlock Jr. *

Simon Sebag Montefiore Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore (; born 27 June 1965) is a British historian, television presenter and author of popular history books and novels, including ''Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar' (2003), Monsters: History's Most Evil Men and ...

* Tom Nichols * Mark Palmer * Richard Pipes * Condoleezza Rice * Myron Rush * Mark Saroyan * Stephen Sestanovich * Dimitri Simes * Marshall D. Shulman *

Timothy D. Snyder Timothy David Snyder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe. He is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute f ...

Llewellyn Thompson Llewellyn E. "Tommy" Thompson Jr. (August 24, 1904 – February 6, 1972) was an American diplomat. He served in Sri Lanka, Austria, and for a lengthy period in the Soviet Union, where his tenure saw some of the most significant events of the Cold ...

Robert F. Kennedy Robert Francis Kennedy (November 20, 1925June 6, 1968), also known by his initials RFK and by the nickname Bobby, was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 64th United States Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964, ...

's Kremlinologist * Robert C. Tucker, biographer of

and former head of

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ni ...

's Russian Studies program * Adam Ulam, brother of

Stanisław Ulam Stanisław Marcin Ulam (; 13 April 1909 – 13 May 1984) was a Polish-American scientist in the fields of mathematics and nuclear physics. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapon ...

and head of the Russian Research Center at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

* Donald S. Zagoria

References

{{reflist Subfields of political science Politics of the Soviet Union Foreign relations of the Soviet Union Cold War terminology Russian studies

Historiography

Techniques

After the Cold War

Notable Kremlinologists and Sovietologists

See also

References