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Enduring Misconceptions About the Soviet Union
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11542 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1986 |
9,341 Words |
| Author
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Paul Hollander
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I have been teaching courses on Soviet society since 1963 and have published books and articles on Soviet affairs during that period. From the beginning of my life in the United States, I have been impressed by how difficult it is even for educated Americans to understand the Soviet system and by how little help is given by schools, colleges, mass media, and opinion leaders. I have recently come to the conclusion that there has been little, if any, progress in public understanding of the Soviet Union. On the contrary, misconceptions and wrongheaded stereotypes persist, modified by occasional semantic innovations or trendy concepts.
Learning about the Soviet system has never been easy. The language barrier, a secretive regime, lack of opportunity for field studies, and limited scholarly contacts have all combined to limit the flow of information. Even today, only a handful of social scientists specialize in Soviet studies or teach courses about Soviet society. Over the years, I have come to realize, however, that the problem has not been the lack of information as such, and under Khrushchev and Brezhnev it even became easier to learn about certain aspects of Soviet society, with Soviet social scientists and journalists contributing to the growth of knowledge and providing occasional revelations that had formerly been proscribed.
Numerous authentic accounts of Soviet concentration camps had been published in the West before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag series, though they received little attention. There was likewise information about the less genial aspects of Stalin's personality before Khrushchev addressed himself to the topic at the 20th Party Congress. Public awareness of such matters, however, remained negligible. Curiously enough, even before anti-communism had the unsavory reputation (in liberal circles, at any rate) it later acquired, as a consequence of the activities of the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, a thorough understanding of the Soviet system was rare phenomenon. Anti-communists, moreover, were no better informed than the sympathizers or those otherwise inclined to give Soviet authorities the benefit of the doubt.
I have gradually come to realize that it is not information about the actual state of affairs in Soviet society - published in scholarly journals by well-funded researchers with the requisite language skills - the determines U.S. beliefs about and attitudes toward the Soviet Union. They are determined rather by domestic political and cultural conditions and by "climates of opinion."
American and
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