1. The North American Review, cited in Filene, Peter G., Americans and the Soviet Experiment, 1917-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 33–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Bailey, Thomas A., America Faces Russia (Ithaca, 1950), p. 292 Google Scholar. In a Senate speech on April 28, 1920, Senator Henry L. Myers denounced the Bolshevik barbarians for “nationalizing” all women, destroying “the home, the fireside, the family, the cornerstones of civilization,” and undertaking to demolish “what God created and ordained.” As Filene puts it, “The Bolsheviks became convenient monsters to be dressed with one's favorite prejudices or fears” (Americans and the Soviet Experiment, p. 46).

3. Daily Worker (New York), Feb. 25, 1942

4. David, Sarnoff, Looking Ahead (New York, 1968), p. 1968.Google Scholar

5. Address at the Annual Dinner of the American Council of Learned Societies, Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 1966; in ACLS Newsletter, January-February 1966, p. 10.

6. Charles, Seymour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 4 vols. (Boston, 1926-28), 3: 398.Google Scholar

7. Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., A Thousand Days (New York, 1965), p. 1965.Google Scholar

8. For standard surveys of studies of the USSR see, for example, Walter, Laqueur and Leopold, Labedz, eds., The State of Soviet Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)Google Scholar; Fisher, Harold H., ed., American Research on Russia (Bloomington, Ind., 1959);Google Scholar Marshall D., Shulman, “The Future of Soviet Studies in the United States,” Slavic Review, 29, no. 3 (September 1970): 582–88Google Scholar; and Walter, Laqueur, The Fate of the Revolution (New York, 1967)Google Scholar

9. See Merton, Robert K., On Theoretical Sociology (New York, 1967), chap. 2.Google Scholar

10. In another instance (a Polish diplomat relates), when in October 1962 the duty officer at the foreign office reported to Wfadyslaw Gomulka that, according to President Kennedy, Khrushchev was emplacing nuclear missiles in Cuba, Gomulka reportedly replied, “Nonsense: Khrushchev isn't such a fool as to do that!” For a recent discussion of the literature on social science prediction, see Lloyd, Jensen, “Predicting International Events,” Peace Research Reviews, 4, no. 6 (1972): 1–46.Google Scholar

11. The late Henry L. Roberts was one of the few who articulated this concern. In addressing the first convention of the AAASS (“Frontiers of Slavic Studies”) he remarked, “It properly makes us uneasy to find our thoughts and research appearing as dependent variables of the vicissitudes of the great world of power, conflict, and political responsibility.”

12. I am quite willing to acknowledge that my own concern with this problem— though it is, I am persuaded, a genuine one—may also reflect the changing character of the times and in particular of Soviet-American relations.

13. A related phenomenon has been the (perfectly understandable and innocent) proliferation of dissertations dealing with the writings and pronouncements of individual leaders—a corpus obviously easier to survey than their behavior.

14. The same, mutatis mutandis, applies to the tendency to prefer an attribution of malicious intent to a more neutral interpretation (e.g., inertia, incompetence, bureaucratic inefficiency, or uncertainty) whenever developments could be explained either way.

15. Dinerstein, Herbert S., “The Soviet Outlook,” in Osgood, Robert E. et al., America and the World (Baltimore, 1970), p. 79 Google Scholar. There may also be nonpolitical components built into political predictions of this sort. As Lloyd Jensen remarks, “There is a tendency toward conservatism in human prediction, particularly in a situation in which a subordinate is reporting to a superior.” He relates this to the “fear of being wrong” (“Predicting International Events,” p. 17).

16. See, for example, Laqueur, The Fate of the Revolution; Sidney, Ploss, ed., The Soviet Political Process (Waltham, Mass., 1971)Google Scholar; Frederic, Fleron, ed., Communist Studies and the Social Sciences (Chicago, 1970)Google Scholar; Roger, Kanet, ed., The Behavioral Revolution in Communist Studies (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; and Harry Rigby, T., “Totalitarianism and Change in Communist Systems,” Comparative Politics, April 1972, p. 433 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. On “totalitarianism” and its implications see, in addition to Friedrich, Carl J. and Brzezinski, Zbigniew, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1965)Google Scholar; Friedrich, Carl J. et al., Totalitarianism in Perspective (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Robert, Burrowes, “Totalitarianism: The Revised Standard Version,” World Politics, January 1969, pp. 272–94Google Scholar; Herbert, Spiro, “Totalitarianism,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968), 16: 106–13Google Scholar; and Leonard, Schapiro, Totalitarianism (London, 1972)Google Scholar.

18. As a student of earlier American attitudes toward Russia commented, “Those who complained of distorted information about Soviet Russia falsely assumed that Americans would revise their views if given the facts. On the contrary, the distortion was in itself an attitude—the attitude that contrary facts could not be true” (Filene, Americans and the Soviet Experiment, pp. 68-69). In addition, American students of Soviet foreign policy frequently failed to give proper weight (1) to the reactive aspects of Soviet policy, and (2) to the impact of the behavior of other states on internal elite arguments and assessments of the international “correlation of forces,” even if such effects were not promptly or visibly translated into Soviet foreign-policy behavior.

For some further comments on American assessments of Soviet foreign policy see also William, Welch, American Images of Soviet Foreign Policy (New Haven, 1970)Google Scholar; Welch, William and Triska, Jan F., “Soviet Foreign Policy Studies and Foreign Policy Models,” World Politics, July 1971, pp. 704–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dinerstein, Herbert S., Intervention Against Communism (Baltimore, 1967)Google Scholar; William, Zimmerman, “Elite Perspectives and the Explanation of Soviet Foreign Policy,” Journal of International Affairs, 24, no. 1 (1970): 84–98 Google Scholar, and his “Soviet Foreign Policy Goals in the.l970's,” Survey, no. 87 (Spring 1973), pp. 188-98. On fallacies in models of Soviet behavior see also the review article by Harvey, Fireside, “Analyzing Soviet Affairs: Methods and Myths,” Problems of Communism, May-June 1972, pp. 77–79.Google Scholar

19. Rather pathetically a senior scholar once warned against too readily accepting evidence of change in the Soviet system. Every zig, he maintained, had always been followed by a zag; and in his entire lifetime of experience things had invariably wound up “right back where they started, only worse.” But what, I recall asking him, if some day there should be genuine and significant new departures—how would he tell? He replied disarmingly: “It won't happen—but if it does, I'll be sure to miss it.”

20. Kennan, George F., Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (Boston, 1961), pp. 396–97.Google Scholar

21. See also Harold J., Berman, “The Devil and Soviet Russia,” American Scholar, Spring 1958, pp. 147–52Google Scholar. Such an orientation may well be related to what Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in American politics. For a variety of reasons Americans have been “inclined to conceptualize their relationship with the rest of the world in conspiratorial terms.” Davis, David Brion, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy (Ithaca, 1971), p. xix.Google Scholar

On more than one occasion, however, American interpreters have seemed to insist simultaneously on incompatible opposites: both the omnipotence of Soviet control structures and the imminent collapse of the system; both the fanaticism of the Soviet leadership and its calculating rationality; both condemnation for their being Communists and gloating over their abandoning doctrinal orthodoxy; both their dependence on economic and technological assistance and know-how from abroad and the imminent prospect of the Soviet Union “overtaking” the West.

22. I have in mind the work of such men as Carl Linden, Michel Tatu, Roman Kolkowicz, Sidney Ploss, and Robert Conquest, however much they may differ among themselves.

23. For more systematic comments see, for example, Ploss, Soviet Political Process; Zagoria, Donald S., “A Note on Methodology,” in his Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956-1961 (Princeton, 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; William E., Griffith, “On Esoteric Communication,” Studies in Comparative Communism, January 1970, pp. 47–54 Google Scholar; Dallin, Alexander and Brzezinski, Zbigniew, “Issues and Methods,” in Dallin, Alexander et al., eds., Diversity in International Communism (New York, 1963), pp. xxv–xliv.Google Scholar

I am not here concerned with the debate between “kremlinological” and “behavioral” protagonists, which strikes, me as in large measure based on a false dilemma. For a recent discussion see Karl W., Ryavec, “Kremlinology or Behavioralism ?” Problems of Communism, January-February 1973, pp. 81–85.Google Scholar

24. Suffice it to mention three volumes: Brzezinski, Zbigniew and Huntington, Samuel, Political Power USA/USSR (New York, 1964)Google Scholar; Donald W. Treadgold, ed., Soviet and Chinese Communism (Seattle, 1967)Google Scholar; and Chalmers, Johnson, ed., Change in Communist Systems (Stanford, 1970)Google Scholar.

25. Truman, David B., “Disillusion and Regeneration: The Quest for a Discipline,” American Political Science Review, December 1965, p. 870.Google Scholar

26. Similarly, public understanding of Soviet affairs may be no worse than of other areas. While most college students (in a national cross section, excluding freshmen) could in 1967 identify Lenin, Stalin, and Brezhnev, some 10 percent thought that the Soviet Union had fought on Germany's side in World War II. But roughly one-quarter of the same sample could not identify Mao Tse-tung, and one-fifth could not properly place the Suez Canal. See Don D. Smith, “An American Elite's Knowledge About the Soviet Union,” World Affairs, Spring 1972, pp. 344-51.

Sad to relate, another investigator, who asked a sample of journalists, military and civilian government personnel, and academics to make predictions, reports that “even when isolating the Soviet expert in terms of his predictions about Soviet behavior, his accuracy was shown to be no greater than that of persons with other specialties” (Jensen, “Predicting International Events,” p. 35).

27. Walter Laqueur has argued that “on past occasions American public opinion has almost invariably erred on the side of exaggerated hopes, followed inevitably by feelings of equally unwarranted anticlimax.” He warns that “now the era of regarding Marxism as evil incarnate has perhaps been replaced by what could be called the new age of false symmetry, the belief that Russia is much like the United States, a conservative, status quo power in foreign relations, sharing its desire to ‘decommit without withdrawal symptoms’” ( Laqueur, , “The Cool War,” New York Times Magazine, Sept. 12, 1972, p. 15 Google Scholar).

28. One need not share his unduly benign view of Soviet policy to be impressed by Parenti's evidence and analysis of American attitudes toward communism. See Michael, Parenti, The Anti-Communist Impulse (New York, 1969)Google Scholar.