THE SINS OF SOVIETOLOGY: The collapse of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe for Sovietologists and, more broadly, the entire discipline of political science. Never has so much money been allocated to study one country; never have so many academic and government specialists scrutinized every aspect of a country’s life from evidence provided by published and unpublished sources as well as eavesdropping devices and satellites. Yet when the end came, the experts found themselves utterly unprepared. To the extent that political sci-ence wishes to be treated as scholarship, it clearly behooves its practitioners to confront this failure.
Obviously, this is not the place to undertake such an analysis. Yet Mr. Garthoff’s volume invites some remarks on this subject, for it is a serious work, based on a thorough study of a wide range of sources and filled with interesting information. Why would such a massive, earnest effort fail equally to predict what would happen and to explain con-vincingly what did happen?
The fiasco of Sovietology — something its practitioners have yet to acknowledge — may well have had its root cause in the determination of political scientists to act like physicists or biologists in order to earn the kind of prestige accorded to natural scientists. But, as demonstrated well over a century ago by German and Russian philosophers, the study of mankind differs fundamentally from the study of nature, in part because the ob-server is identical with the object observed and in part because, unlike molecules and cells, human beings have values and objectives that preclude their being analyzed in a value-free, unteleological manner. Thus the investigation of social and political organizations calls for a methodology closer to that employed in history and even literature.
Unfortunately, modern political scientists, ignoring this counsel, have proceeded to dehumanize the study of state and society, turning it into an arid discipline that at its worst resembles medieval scholasticism in its remoteness from life, self-verifying methodology, and self-confirming conclusions. The Sovietologists refused to read Soviet novels and poetry, or at any rate to take them into account, on the grounds that they were “soft” sources, incapable of being assessed scientifically. They ignored history as irrelevant. They treated information supplied by dissident émigrés from the Soviet Union conde-scendingly because it could not be evaluated according to accepted sociological standards. As a result, they missed everything that was vital in that society and that, in the end, made it unworkable: human aspirations and human discontent.
When the study of state and society was called “politics” rather than “political science,” it did much more than contemplate the mechanics of “social structures” and the “functions” of institutions. Aristotle began his Politics with a description of the household and concluded it with a disquisition on the role of music in the education of children. Hobbes opened The Leviathan with a lengthy discussion, “Of Man,” and Machiavelli, whom Mr. Garthoff cites in the epigraph of his new book, insisted that understanding hu-man nature was essential to the statesman. Their twentieth-century followers have forgot-ten this reality.
These founders of political theory would probably have understood much better than modern political scientists what went on in the Soviet Union by observing the regime’s treatment of its citizens and their reactions to this treatment. Is it too much to ask of those who study politics to bear in mind that their subject is, first and foremost, not “structures,” “models,” “functions,” or geopolitical aspirations and conflicts, but concrete human be-ings, both in their eternal substance and as molded by their particular history and envi-ronment? And that their discipline, for all its use of scientific techniques, belongs not with science but with the humanities?”
Of course, we can achieve some success only by overcoming our own mistakes, laziness, general, own personal shortcomings. In general, all our tragedies stem from our inherent, specific defects, congenital or acquired. This is possible due to self-discipline and purely internal psychological motivation for self-improvement, and not just physical survival.
Thus, for more than twenty years, post-Soviet society developed from chaos and indifference to antagonism with the so-called “Russian World”. Now we have to realize the fact that the Russian-Ukrainian war can be ended either in Moscow or Kyiv. Other intercivilizational wars also cannot end up by complete reconciliation. Now a similar process that we can observe in the main western countries is that they face external enemies in Putin’s Russia and in the Muslim countries of the Middle East, who are looking for allies in Central Europe, in the same main Western countries, to create dense closed enclaves within Western societies as starting points for an attack on the West as a whole.