ABSTRACT
The 1950s and 1960s were the golden age of Sovietology in the West. Funds were made available, places like St. Anthony's College in Oxford and the Harvard Russian Research Center prospered, some excellent young people were drawn into the field, first-rate studies appeared covering various aspects of the Soviet experience—political, social, economic, and cultural. The Soviet system was a "development dictatorship of social justice" aiming to make the Soviet people freer and more prosperous, whereas the Western systems were both reactionary and in decline. As in the case of Sovietology, there was a revolt against the previous generation of experts and their theories—and the consequences were surprisingly similar. The result of these studies was ridiculous: A Hitler (and a Stalin) who were Hamletian figures, prisoners of the bureaucracy; half the time they did not even know what went on around them.
