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To: Zoltan! who wrote (1957)	11/22/1999 1:36:00 PM
From: jbe	Respond to of 3246

Zoltan, Abe Brumberg is the former editor of the former Problems of Communism, hardly a radical rag, considering that it was put out by the USIA. It is true that the collapse of the Soviet Union caught almost all Sovietologists -- of whatever political persuasion -- "with their pants down," as it were. At the time, I attributed part of that to the fact that most of them were political scientists, by training. (Needless to say, I am a historian.) That is to say, they were so used to dealing with static "models" of Communism, and so used to glacial change under Brezhnev et al., that they could not visualize anything that didn't fit into their "models." To give you one example: I once interviewed a well-known "Sovietologist," who shall remain nameless (I will say only that she was a woman), for a program about the rise of opposition to the Communist Party's monopoly of political power. Ordinary people were writing letters to the editor demanding its abolition, etc. Well, she could not believe that it was happening. "Must be a small circle of dissident intellectuals," she insisted. Since I was following developments in the Soviet Union on a day-to-day basis, I knew she was really out of it. (And of course, within the year, Gorbachev forced a Party Congress to renounce its constitutionally guaranteed "leading role.") But she was so wedded to her "model" that she could not detect changes occurring beneath the surface of Soviet society. It was not that she was "pro-Soviet"; quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. It was just that her view of things was too rigid to allow her to see anything but what she had always seen.