ABSTRACT
In many dozen books and hundreds of articles Soviet readers have been told that Sovietologists were not only wrong in their facts and comments, but deliberately lying and distorting, haters of communism and the Soviet Union, in brief, evil people. To assess the achievements and failures of Sovietology, to gain the right perspective, it is useful to know about the problems of the study of other countries and political movements. German Sovietology—leading in the world before 1933—was more realistic. While there were few Stalinists among Western experts, there were even fewer Russophobes. True, many of them committed mistakes—but these were usually not the mistakes about which Soviet propaganda complained. Stalinism reminded them of the old Russia—at least in some respects. Isaac Deutscher was a passionate Leninist who fervently believed that while Stalin was a cruel dictator, Stalinism was historically inevitable. He expected in 1953 that Russia would return to pristine Leninism, greater freedom, greater prosperity, less barbarism.
