Introduction

Abstract

More than 40 years ago, in a paper entitled “Ten Theories in Search of Soviet Reality: The Prediction of Soviet Behavior in the Social Sciences,” Daniel Bell wrote:

Surely, more has been written about the Russian Revolution and the ensuing forty years of Soviet rule than about any comparable episode in human history. The bibliography of items on the French Revolution occupies, it is said, one wall of the Bibliotheque Nationale. A complete bibliography on the Soviet Union—which is yet to be compiled and may never be because of the geometric rate at which it multiplies—would make that earlier cenotaph to scholarship shrink the way in which the earlier tombs diminished before the great complex at Karnak.

He continues by exclaiming: “And yet how little of this awesome output has stood the test of so short a span of time!”¹ Bell penned these lines when the West, and particularly the United States, was obsessed with what made the Soviets (or the Russians, since in those days the terms were synonymous) “tick” and how to predict what they would do next.