Kremlinology is the study of Soviet politics and policies, named after the Kremlin, the seat of the Soviet government. Kremlinologist refers to media, academic and commentary experts that specialized in Soviet Union and the CPSU. Sovietology/Sovietologist are the respective synonyms. Soviet redirects here. ... Jump to: navigation, search The Moscow Kremlin The Moscow Kremlin (Russian: МоÑковÑкий Кремль) is the best known kremlin (Russian citadel). ... The Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( Russian: Коммунисти́ческая Па́ртия Сове́тского Сою́за = КПСС) was the name used by the successors of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party from 1952 to 1991, but the wording Communist Party was present in the partys name since 1918 when...
Since the Cold War, lack of reliable information about the country forced Western analyzers to "read between the lines" and to use the tiniest tidbits, such as the removal of portraits or rearranging of chairs and other indirect signs, to try to understand what was happening in internal Soviet politics. Jump to: navigation, search For the generic term for a high-tension struggle between countries, see cold war (war). ...
The term "kremlinology" is still in use in application to the study of the politics of Russian Federation.
Sovietology, created by three academics, Philip Mosely (Columbia), Merle Fainsod (Harvard), Leonard Schapiro (London School of Economics) in the aftermath of World War II, was the more serious of the disciplines since it sought to breach the secrecy of the Soviet dictatorship through scholarship.
Sovietology reached its full flowering in the 1960s with the publication of Robert Conquest's "The Great Terror," which managed to pierce the Iron Curtain and describe Stalin's genocidal rule in sanguinary detail.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 Kremlinology and Sovietology were diminished in academic importance except, perhaps, to Western historians who for a few years were able to examine Soviet government and Communist Party archives.
Sovietology was for many decades a popular and well-subsidized industry.
The second goal was carried out successfully, but at the cost of an unscientific identification of socialism with Stalinism, and, in the final analysis, at the cost of undermining the first goal of analysis and forecast of Soviet developments.
The well developed and well funded western Sovietology generally speaking failed miserably in foreseeing or explaining the collapse of the Soviet Union and the other Stalinist states when their ruling bureaucratic elites switched sides and installed capitalism.
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