Critiquing the Failures of Sovietology

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A "grand inquest" on the 20-year failure of mainstream Sovietology to diagnose correctly the incurable ills of the Soviet Union has just been published in the foreign affairs quarterly the National Interest.

The critique, titled "The Strange Death of Soviet Communism: An Autopsy," comprises a series of studies by a group of noted academics. It places no blame on the failed Sovietologists for not having predicted the unexpected Soviet implosion. As far as misprophecy is concerned, Professor Charles L. Fairbanks Jr. of Johns Hopkins University, who edited the issue, writes, "We were all wrong." Fairbanks is too modest. In the spring of 1990, he published an article in which he said: "The end of rule in Moscow by people who identify themselves as communists ... will probably come by 1995. It could conceivably happen as early as this summer."

The underlying reason for the …