ABSTRACT
The state confronts Sovietologists with a moral dilemma that is most easily resolved by flight into routine behavioralism. To be sure, the radical rejection of totalitarianism as a conceptual mode pushed Sovietology away from theory; to a certain degree it may be argued that, in ridding themselves of the bath water, Sovietologists also threw out the baby. The reasons for Sovietology’s underdevelopment involve far more than some ingrained incapacity to a great leap forward to comparative communist studies or, even, to comparative politics. The first inclination of postwar Sovietology was to appropriate the formallegal baggage of prewar political science and fill it with totalitarian content. Pedagogical imperatives and historical origins may account for Sovietology’s perpetual lagging behind political science, but they do little to explain its current obsession with facts. The transformation of the United States and the Soviet Union into superpowers, together with Stalin’s expansion into Eastern Europe, placed the USSR at the top of Western political agendas.
