In his review of The Neo-Stalinist State, Luke reproaches me for neglecting both “the new importance of the USSR's and Eastern Europe's niche in the world economic system” and the use of the East-West economic exchange by the Soviet regime to “sustain its ‘neo-Stalinist’ state.” These criticisms are well taken. Yet, I deliberately concentrated on the inner workings of the Soviet state in its mature form without going into the problems of the Soviet position in the global system. After pointing (...) to these weaknesses, Luke suggests his own interpretation of Soviet developments in the past decades. They can be summarized as follows. (shrink)

What makes the on-going debate concerning ethnic relations in the USSR so tedious is that one can rather accurately predict the authors' conclusions by just knowing in which country they happen to live: Soviet literature tends overwhelmingly to stress the internationalizing effects of ethnic integration, while American literature emphasizes just as forcefully the disintegrating effects of ethnic nationalism. The Soviet emphasis can, of course, be partly explained by the fact that Soviet sociologists cannot publish anything which fails to substantiate the (...) official proposition that “the integration of nationalities in the USSR proceeds at an increasingly rapid rate.” Moreover, Soviet researchers have not carried out comparative studies of ethnic relations and nationalist phenomena in Western and Soviet-type societies — studies which would lead them to a more complex understanding of the issue. (shrink)

The concept of totalitarianism as an “ideal type” found its fullest realization in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.1 Following the Soviet collapse, scholars gained access to an enormous amount of information concerning the inner workings of the Soviet system and the intentions of the Soviet leadership. For the first time, comprehensive data concerning the functioning of the coercive apparatus, the scope of terror and deportations, and, perhaps most important, the true extent of the militarization of Soviet economy and society (...) is now available. These data allow a much better understanding of Soviet reality and of 20th century totalitarian…. (shrink)

All the social sciences are now in flux and Soviet studies even more so. Many traditional approaches prove to be useless for understanding the changed world and there is a search for new explanatory models, and even for “alternative organizing myths.” All this fosters confusion and during such periods of “paradigm change” debates assume predictable characteristics. First of all, there appears a large gap between, in John Stuart Mill's words, “the meaning which a term bears in common acceptation” and that (...) which the writer “intends to annex to it.” It provides a great opportunity for sniping and passionately accusing opponents of lack of conceptual rigor. (shrink)