The Soviet system, the Soviet state, and Western expertise on the USSR before and after 1991

System sowiecki, państwo sowieckie oraz zachodnia wiedza o ZSRR przed i po 1991 roku

Abstrakt: This article provides a brief assessment of the way Western political scientists and international relations scholars analysed and understood the Soviet Union from the 1960s through December 1991. To this end, the article begins with an overview of the nature and basic traits of the Soviet system. Although the article discusses the importance of historical evidence used by political scientists to appraise the nature of Soviet politics and Soviet foreign policy, it does not rehash the once heated (and by now tedious) disputes that arose among Western historians in the late 1970s and 1980s, with so-called “revisionists” lambasting more orthodox historians1. Instead, the focus here is on the quality of Sovietological analyses in the West before December 1991, the new opportunities for archival research that emerged in the former USSR after 1991, and the grave obstacles to scholarship posed by Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine starting in 2022, including the draconian internal clampdown in Russia that accompanied the invasion. As part of this clampdown, the Russian government began arresting innocent foreign citizens and Russian pro democracy activists so they could be held hostage and traded in prisoner swaps for Russian spies and assassins – a policy that was bound to affect the willingness of Western scholars and graduate students to travel to Russia for archival research or any other purpose. The invasion and political crackdown also spurred many leading Russian scholars of Soviet history to go into long-term exile.

PDF: Pobierz