There are rules for writing about the enemy in wartime. You must never forget that your side and his are at war, and that your side is right and his is wrong. Your writing must not give aid or comfort to the enemy. It should never humanise the other side but rather emphasise its essential, evil otherness. Overt partisanship is not just allowed in time of war but required. Even-handedness, if you choose to write about the enemy, would amount to treason.
Whether the same rules applied to writing about the Soviet Union during the Cold War (which after all was a war of words even if guns weren't involved) became a big issue in Sovietology in the 1970s. There were young people like me who had recently come into the academic field and thought they should be able to write about the Soviet Union the way they wrote about everything else – that is, as objectively as they could. And there were people like Robert Conquest, a quarter-century older, formed in different intellectual and political circumstances, who thought the opposite.
Sovietology emerged as an academic profession, US-centred, in the 1950s, when generous Cold War funding vastly increased the size of the field while at the same time institutionalising the ‘know your enemy' approach. But before it became an academic profession, it was a practice developed by Western – i.e. British and American – intelligence agencies. The Soviet Union, with frontiers firmly closed since the early 1930s, was cut off from the rest of the world to an extent that is now hard to imagine. To find out about its politics, or any other aspect of it, you had to acquire proficiency in close reading of Pravda and a few other key texts, supplemented by defectors' accounts, intelligence reports and diplomatic gossip. These techniques, developed in intelligence agencies, made their way into the new academic field of Soviet studies under the name of Kremlinology.
Khrushchev's Thaw brought a partial opening of the Soviet Union to the West, in the form mainly of cultural exchanges that took the younger generation of scholars from the US and the UK (including me) on year-long visits. The informal view of these exchanges in the West was that we sent them our bona fide young historians and literary scholars to research their Harvard and Oxford PhDs, while they sent us spies in the guise of scientists. From the Soviet standpoint, both sides sent their spies, since those Western PhD students, however academically legitimate, were bound to be trying to ferret out Soviet secrets. This assumption on the part of the Soviets was a disadvantage for us exchangees, but not a crippling one. We had a good time ferreting out the secrets relevant to our PhDs, learning by the seat of our pants how Soviet society worked, and making friends (despite official discouragement from both sides) with a few Russians.
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