Serious stock-taking among Sovietologists

Serious stock-taking is in progress now among practitioners of what has been called Sovietology, meaning studies of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The reason is that the field for the most part had not been expecting what happened in 1991: The USSR collapsed and went out of existence as a unified state system governing a sixth of the world's territory, having allowed its East European empire to free itself from Soviet dominance somewhat earlier.

It might be said in defense of Sovietology that, by the beginning of the 1980s, it understood that economic and political crises were brewing in the Soviet Union and its outer empire. But the field as a whole failed to grasp the full depth of the systemic crisis in Soviet Russia and the destructive or self-destructive potentialities inhering in it. As the editors of this valuable volume write in the Introduction: Sovietology was not prepared for perestroika and postcommunism.