Product Code Database
Kremlinology is the study and analysis of the Soviet government, and subsequently the Russian government, and their policies.Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. Kremlinology. The term emerged during the Cold War to describe a method of inference developed in response to the opacity and secrecy of the Soviet political system. Named after the Moscow Kremlin, the seat of the former Soviet government, the discipline was pioneered by the works of Boris Nicolaevsky and Franz Borkenau, among other scholars. By extension, Kremlinology is sometimes used to denote attempts to understand the inner workings of any secretive organization or decision-making process through the interpretation of indirect or symbolic evidence, for example in analyses of contemporary North Korea.
Sovietology, by contrast, refers to the broader interdisciplinary study of the Soviet Union as a political, economic, social, and ideological system.Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. Sovietology. Scholars in these fields are distinct from Transitology, who study legal, economic and social transitions from communism to market capitalism.
The "revisionist school" beginning in the 1960s focused on relatively autonomous institutions which might influence policy at the higher level. (2005). 9781139446631, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781139446631 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 and Lynne Viola challenged the "totalitarian model" approach to Soviet history and were most active in the Soviet archives.
To study the relations between Communist fraternal states, Kremlinologists compared the statements issued by the respective national Communist party, 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 lent to dignitaries. Kremlinology also emphasized ritual, 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), hinting at the fact that its results were often vague and inconclusive, if not outright wrong.
While the Soviet Union no longer exists, other secretive states still do, such as North Korea, for which Kremlinology-like approaches are still used by the Western media. Such study is sometimes called "Pyongyangology", after the country's capital Pyongyang.
|
|
