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The Perestroika of Soviet Studies: Thinking and Teaching About the Soviet Union in Comparative Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Peter Zwick
Peter Zwick*
Affiliation:
California State University, San Marcos
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Extract

President Gorbachev has fundamentally changed the Soviet political system. Whether Gorbachev survives another month, year, or decade, the Soviet system will not return to the party-state command economy that preceded his tenure. Although the Soviet changes have not yet resulted in the total repudiation of the communist system, as in Eastern Europe, and a neoconservative retrenchment is possible, those of us who study and teach Soviet politics must respond to these developments with a perestroika of Soviet studies and “new thinking” about the Soviet Union.

Concepts and techniques formerly alien to Soviet studies must become integral components of our analysis. Even if we cannot completely discard such concepts as totalitarianism, Marxism-Leninism, and democratic centralism, we must begin to include theories of pluralism, constitutionalism, and federalism. Patently, oldstyle Kremlinology and “black box” analysis must be supplemented if not replaced by public opinion polling, studies of electoral behavior, and legislative roll-call analysis. Rather than thinking and teaching about the USSR in isolation or in the narrow context of comparative communism, we should look at Soviet politics from a broader comparative perspective that draws on theories and examples from Western and Third World systems. Quite simply, the restructuring of how we teach and study Soviet politics must be as fundamental and as sweeping as Gorbachev's perestroika of the Soviet system.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , September 1991 , pp. 461 - 467
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1991

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