Where Sovietologists Went Wrong

To understand the attitudes-and failures-of the Sovietological community in the United States one must bear in mind the conditions under which the study of the Soviet Union had gotten underway in this country. It first emerged at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s and took off, as it were, in 1957, after the Russians had launched the Sputnik, a potential weapon system which (for the first time in U.S. history) directly threatened its security and even survival. It is commonly believed that the circumstance of its origin infused Sovietology with irreconcilable hostility toward communism and the USSR, breeding a Cold War mentality. In fact, it had the very opposite effect. In Europe, where communist ideology had a history going back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century and communist parties had come into being in the early 1920s, scholars and publicists had analyzed communism on its own merits for a century before it attracted the attention of the United States. Some of them -- notably the Poles -- had predicted with astonishing accuracy the nature of a communist regime, anticipating its political despotism and economic failures.

In the United States, such analysis was impeded by the fact that the phenomenon of communism came to be inextricably linked with the dread of nuclear war. Largely ignorant of Marxist theory and the history of both Russia and the Soviet Union, Americans tended to see the problem exclusively in foreign policy terms: that is, how to avoid the conflict between the two camps leading to a nuclear holocaust. It made them conciliatory and this meant that they stressed positive developments in the Communist bloc and interpreted them in the best possible light. Quite unconsciously they minimized differences and emphasized similarities. However well intentioned the sentiments behind this attitude, they misconstrued reality, as inevitably happens when truth is subordinated to politics. The Sovietological community was first and foremost committed to bringing the the adversaries together and in so doing ignored or downplayed whatever ran counter to this objective. As a result, it grossly misunderstood the nature of communist regimes and the forces that animated them.

This approach enjoyed popularity because it carried a comforting message. It appealed to those who had no sympathy for communism but were frightened of nuclear war and liked to think that patience and understanding would persuade the Russians to adopt a more friendly stance. Evidence to the contrary was rationalized. Thus when it became apparent that the Soviet Union, having attained by 197O nuclear parity with the United States, nevertheless proceeded to deploy additional missile systems, some of them MIRVed, this conduct was explained by (1) the alleged"paranoia" of Russians induced by frequent foreign invasions, or (2) the need to confront the Chinese with whom at the time they were at daggers drawn. Such rationalizations of what to any unprejudiced observer were aggressive buildups were the daily bread of opinion makers.

The misunderstanding of Russian motives and intentions had also deeper cultural causes. For most Americans the axiom that all people are equal leads more or less inadvertently to the belief that they are the same by which they mean that they are at heart like themselves so that given a chance, they would behave like themselves. If a nation behaves aggressively toward the United States, it is because it is justly aggrieved: by extrapolation, the blame for aggression falls not on the aggressor but on his victim. The logic is quite flawed but psychologically understandable. Throughout the years of the Cold War, a high proportion of educated, affluent Americans felt guilty of provoking the Russians and pressed for concessions to them to make them feel more"secure."(1)

The Russians exploited such American perceptions With admirable skill. They projected the image of a country aspiring to become another United States--if not, perhaps, as affluent then, at any rate, socially more just. Americans fell for this cynical propaganda because they liked to believe both in fundamental human goodness and the desire of the world to emulate the American way of life. The Soviet Union Today, the slick propaganda magazine distributed in the United States, resembled remarkably the equally slick Amerika, which had great difficulty gaining distribution there. For the American elite, the Russians fielded teams of crafty propagandists, like the loathsome Georgii Arbatov, the head of the U.S.A. Institute, an organ of the KGB, who played to perfection the role of a pipe-puffing, jolly fellow which many businessmen and academics found irresistible. By pretending not to take communist ideology seriously and cracking an occasional joke about their regime, the Arbatovs made one wonder what the East-West confrontation was all about.

The theoretical foundation of this approach, whose true basis was fear coupled with greed, came from the Sovietological profession, recruited mainly from university departments of political science, economics, and sociology and enthusiastically endorsed by the scientific community for which ideology and politics were not serious matters. Lavishly funded by the government and private foundations, its members held endless conferences in the United States, Europe and the USSR, published no end of symposia, and collaborated on many research projects. For the sake of harmony, scholars who held significantly different views were barred from these activities. In this manner, considerable unanimity was obtained and"group think" flourished. That is not to say that there was no room for controversy: there was room but it was strictly circumscribed. Thus, for example, it was permissible to maintain that the Soviet regime was more stable or less stable but not that it was unstable.

Insisting that moral judgments have no place in science (and they considered themselves scientists) the Sovietologists treated societies as if they were mechanisms, One of their basic premises held that all societies performed the same"functions," even if in different ways, on which grounds they interpreted in familiar terms all those features of the communist regime which to a mind untutored in social science appeared outlandish. One such"expert," for example, found no significant difference between the way New Haven was administered and any city of similar size in the Soviet Union.(2) The net result of this methodology was to depict communist societies as not fundamentally different from democratic ones: a conclusion that reinforced the policy recommendation that we could and should come to terms with them.

In this manner a consensus was forged. Nothing, not even travel to the Soviet Union or the appearance in the West of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees with their own tales to tell, could sway the Sovietological profession in its opinions because here science coincided with self-interest. None of these experts asked themselves--at any rate, aloud--such obvious questions as, for example, if things were indeed so normal and stable there, why did communist governments prevent their citizens from freely traveling abroad? or why did they insist on unanimity of public opinion? or why did they allow only one candidate and one party to run in"elections?" Such embarrassing questions were ignored, and when raised, went unanswered. To an unprejudiced mind such facts about the USSR suggested insecurity, and insecurity indicated fragility.

Footnotes

(1)I must confess with shame that for a short time, in the years immediately following World War II I, too, fell victim of this kind of reasoning. In November 1948, disgusted by what I considered Truman's provocatively aggressive policies toward the Soviet Union, I voted for Henry Wallace, a presidential candidate backed by the Communist Party.

(2)In the words of Jerry F. Hough:"If we could engage in a detailed case study of local government in the Soviet Union, it is highly probable that we would arrive at many of the same conclusions that Robert Dahl did In his study of New Haven": How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 512.

This excerpt is reprinted with the permission of Yale University Press.