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 transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
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 Comint ...
s more generally. These two terms were synonymous until the
dissolution of the Soviet Union
The dissolution of the Soviet Union, also negatively connoted as rus, Разва́л Сове́тского Сою́за, r=Razvál Sovétskogo Soyúza, ''Ruining of the Soviet Union''. was the process of internal disintegration within the Sov ...
. 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 famil ...
. The term is named after the
Kremlin
The Kremlin ( rus, Московский Кремль, r=Moskovskiy Kreml', p=ˈmɐˈskofskʲɪj krʲemlʲ, t=Moscow Kremlin) is a fortified complex in the center of Moscow founded by the Rurik dynasty, Rurik dynasty. It is the best known of th ...
, 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
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private pr ...
.
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 opposin ...
and during the
Cold War
The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...
was dominated by the "totalitarian model" of the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
,
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 Secreta ...
'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 Comint ...
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 regul ...
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
The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...
, 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 co ...
'' 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. A ...
, 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 de Jaucourt, Louis, chevalier de J ...
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, b ...
, 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 Divination, 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 o ...
), 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 Korea, Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu River, Y ...
, 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 populatio ...
.
Notable Kremlinologists and Sovietologists
*
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 famil ...
, 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 Econo ...
*
John Barron, author of ''The KGB Today''
*
Mark R. Beissinger
Mark R. Beissinger (b. November 28, 1954, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American political scientist. He is the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Politics at Princeton University.
Early life
Beissinger received his bachelor's degree ''magna ...
*
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's ...
*
Hélène Carrère d'Encausse
Hélène Carrère d'Encausse (; born Hélène Zourabichvili; 6 July 1929) is a French political historian of Georgians in France, Georgian origin, specializing in History of Russia, Russian history. Since 1999, she has served as the Perpetual Sec ...
*
Carey Cavanaugh
Carey Edward Cavanaugh (born January 1955) is a former 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 peacebuilding organization ...
*
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
Michael David-Fox (born 21 May 1965) is an American historian who studies modern Russia and the Soviet Union.
Biography
David-Fox received his A.B. from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from Yale University.
David-Fox has been a professor a ...
*
R. W. Davies
Robert William Davies (23 April 1925 – 13 April 2021), better known as R. W. Davies or Bob Davies, was a British historian, writer and professor of Soviet Economic Studies at the University of Birmingham.
Obtaining his PhD in 1954, Davies w ...
*
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 ...
*
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 ...
*
Marshall Goldman
Marshall Irwin Goldman (July 26, 1930 – August 2, 2017) was an American economist and writer. He was an expert on the economy of the former Soviet Union. Goldman was a professor of economics at Wellesley College and associate director of the Ha ...
*
Donald E. Graves
*
Jonathan Haslam
Jonathan Haslam (born January 15, 1951) is George F. Kennan Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge w ...
*
William G. Hyland
William George Hyland (January 18, 1929 – March 25, 2008) was Deputy National Security Advisor to President of the United States Gerald Ford and editor of '' Foreign Affairs'' magazine.
Biography
William G. Hyland was born in Kansas City, Mi ...
*
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 histo ...
*
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
Moshe "Misha" Lewin ( ; 7 November 1921 – 14 August 2010) was a scholar of Russian and Soviet history. He was a major figure in the school of Soviet studies which emerged in the 1960s.
Biography
Moshe Lewin was born in 1921 in Wilno, Poland (no ...
*
William Mandel
William Marx Mandel (June 4, 1917 – November 24, 2016) was an American broadcast journalist, left-wing political activist, and author, best known as a Soviet affairs analyst. He was born in New York City.
Senator McCarthy and the House Un-Am ...
*
Jack F. Matlock Jr.
Jack Foust Matlock Jr. (born October 1, 1929) is an American former ambassador, career Foreign Service Officer, a teacher, a historian, and a linguist. He was a Soviet and Communist studies, specialist in Soviet affairs during some of the most tu ...
*
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
Robie Marcus Hooker Palmer (July 14, 1941 – January 28, 2013) was an American diplomat, who served as United States Ambassador to Hungary from 1986 to 1990. He was a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Committee on the Presen ...
*
Richard Pipes
Richard Edgar Pipes ( yi, ריכארד פּיִפּעץ ''Rikhard Pipets'', the surname literally means 'beak'; pl, Ryszard Pipes; July 11, 1923 – May 17, 2018) was an American academic who specialized in Russian and Soviet history. He publish ...
*
Condoleezza Rice
Condoleezza Rice ( ; born November 14, 1954) is an American diplomat and political scientist who is the current director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A member of the Republican Party, she previously served as the 66th Uni ...
*
Myron Rush
*
Mark Saroyan
*
Stephen Sestanovich
Stephen Rockwell Sestanovich (born June 8, 1950) is an American government official, academic, and author. He is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University where he is the D ...
*
Dimitri Simes
Dimitri Kostantinovich Simes (russian: Дмитрий Константинович Саймс) is the president and CEO of The Center for the National Interest and publisher of its foreign policy bi-monthly magazine, ''The National Interest''. Si ...
*
Marshall D. Shulman
Marshall Darrow Shulman (1916 - June 21, 2007) was an American diplomat, scholar of Soviet studies and the founding director of Harriman Institute, W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union at Columbia University.
Born i ...
*
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
Robert Charles Tucker (May 29, 1918 – July 29, 2010) was an American political scientist and historian. Tucker is best remembered as a biographer of Joseph Stalin and as an analyst of the Soviet political system, which he saw as dynamic rather ...
, biographer 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 Secreta ...
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 nine ...
's Russian Studies program
*
Adam Ulam
Adam Bruno Ulam (8 April 1922 – 28 March 2000) was a Polish-American historian of Jewish descent and political scientist at Harvard University. Ulam was one of the world's foremost authorities and top experts in Sovietology and Kremlinology ...
, 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 higher le ...
*
Donald S. Zagoria
See also
*
Soviet Union–United States relations
Soviet Union–United States relations were fully established in 1933 as the succeeding bilateral ties to those between the Russian Empire and the United States, which lasted from 1776 until 1917; they were also the predecessor to the current ...
*
Russia–United States relations
Russia and the United States maintain one of the most important, critical and strategic foreign relations in the world. Both nations have shared interests in nuclear safety and security, nonproliferation, counterterrorism, and space exploration. ...
*
Team B
Team B was a competitive analysis exercise commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to analyze threats the Soviet Union posed to the security of the United States. It was created, in part, due to a 1974 publication by Albert Wohlstett ...
*
Predictions of the collapse of the Soviet Union
There were people and organizations who predicted that the USSR would dissolve before the eventual Dissolution of the Soviet Union, dissolution of the USSR in 1991.
Authors often credited with having predicted the dissolution of the Soviet Union i ...
*
China watcher
A China watcher, or, less frequently, Pekingologist, is a person who reports on the politics of the People's Republic of China for western consumption, especially in a Cold War context. "China watching" was coined by analogy to birdwatching, which ...
*
Kennan Institute
The Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars was founded in 1974 to carry out studies of the Soviet Union (Sovietology), and subsequently of post-Soviet Russia and other post-Soviet states. The institute is widely ...
*
Slavic studies
Slavic (American English) or Slavonic (British English) studies, also known as Slavistics is the academic field of area studies concerned with Slavic areas, languages, literature, history, and culture. Originally, a Slavist or Slavicist was prim ...
*
Russian studies
Russian studies is an interdisciplinary field crossing politics, history, culture, economics, and languages of Russia and its neighborhood, often grouped under Soviet and Communist studies. Russian studies should not be confused with the study of ...
*
List of Russian legal historians Russian legal historians, scholars who study Russian law in historical perspective, include:
* Harold J. Berman (1918–2007), Harvard law professor and expert on Russian law
* William E. Butler (1939–), distinguished professor of law at Dickins ...
*
List of scholars in Russian law
*
Vaticanology
Vaticanology is a term coined in the 20th century to describe the field of journalism and research studying and reporting about how the Holy See and the Roman Catholic Church operate. It is named after the Vatican City, the Holy See's sovereign ...
*
Soviet and Communist studies
*
Smolensk Archive
References
{{reflist
Subfields of political science
Politics of the Soviet Union
Foreign relations of the Soviet Union
Cold War terminology
Russian studies