ABSTRACT
This chapter suggestes that the era of perestroika and the events of August have left the field of Soviet studies in as much disarray as the Soviet Union itself. The August Revolution is provided the American scholarly community one more jolting reminder of the need to reassess its own ways of conducting research on the Soviet Union and the means for organizing that research. The Joint Advisory Committee on International Programs (JACIP) report raises very diffic. The JACIP panel stressed that political and economic changes in the Soviet Union since 1985 were transforming the conduct of scholarly research on the Soviet Union. The significance of culture could hardly be better studied than in the laboratory of the Soviet Union. The remarkable changes in the practical direction of Soviet foreign policy since 1985 have shattered ideologically based conceptions of its “permanently operating characteristics.”
