ABSTRACT
After Mikhail Gorbachev's ascension to power, considerable effort went into predicting the Soviet future. This concern spread from the op-ed pages and congressional hearings to infect the furthest corners of the discipline of Sovietology. In the Soviet context, acknowledging this role is usually a prelude to a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Mikhail Gorbachev: his courage in launching perestroika, his foolishness in failing to see that democratization would undermine the very institutions which sustained him in power. The Soviet system was held together by fear of the state's capacity to punish dissent. This fear was inherited from the Stalinist past, and the KGB had to do very little to keep it in place. Criticisms of Sovietology for political bias, a tendency to ignore emigres and a lack of scholarly rigor have some validity. Sovietology utterly failed to foresee the speed and scope of the fall of the USSR.
