Comments on Professor Dallin’s “Bias and Blunders in American Studies on the USSR”

Abstract

In his article on Western studies of Soviet power, purpose, and policy—which I shall call Sovietology—Alexander Dallin has brought us to a timely reconsideration of the needs and prospects of our area field. Part of the problem is whether the “remarkable catalogue of hypotheses later abandoned or disproved” really indicates that specialists in Sovietology have been relatively ineffective. Still more important are the real reasons for our failures—and surely they are numerous.