Kremlinology: Applied Anthropology

Charles W. King

At the height of the Cold War there existed within the Western intelligence community a cadre of analysts who specialized taking whatever their agency could get on events within the Soviet Union—human and signals intelligence, Soviet Propaganda—and attempting to divine the inner workings of the Soviet state. These Kremlin watchers, also called Kremlinologists, used the slightest hints: changes in the order of portraits and standing position overlooking parades, and the arrangement of articles in the part’s newspaper Pravda. Kremlinologists resorted to this kind of piecemeal clues to determine who was currently influential within the Soviet Politburo because getting information out the Soviet Union was extremely difficult, but knowing who was pulling the strings behind the Iron Curtain was tremendously valuable. Knowledge of who was in control of Soviet policy, what their tendencies and beliefs were, and who their rivals were could potentially be the difference between escalating a tense situation and finding a resolution that averted a third World War.

Kremlinology was a high stakes exercise in anthropology, taking what information that could be gleaned from the Soviet Union as a whole to elicit fine detail about the day to day politics of the most powerful men in the Soviet government. The Soviet government did not work like any western government, knowledge of how it did function, which was itself scarce in the West, was treasured knowledge. Even then Kremlinologists often got things wrong, or failed to predict sweeping changes in Soviet policy. The underlying assumption of Kremlinology, that Soviet politics are fundamentally different from Western politics demonstrates how the Anthropologist’s Dilemma can affect policy-making and national security in a number of dangerous ways. Knowledge of the extensive dysfunction of the Soviet Union could lead analysts to distain Soviet methods; conversely there are examples of western experts on the Soviet Union becoming disillusioned with Western liberal democracy and becoming Soviet agents. Both are examples of errors endemic to the field of anthropology, because the core assumption of anthropology is that another society is different than one’s own it becomes exceedingly tempting to categorize that society as inferior or superior. Doing this in academia is problematic; doing it in policy-making is dangerous.

Kremlinology did not disappear with the Soviet Union. The term is still used to describe analysis of the internal politics of the Russian Federation. The most famous use of anthropology by the United States in recent years may be the Human Terrain Teams that were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. These teams ended up being controversial, but they did demonstrate the fundamental value of understanding the society that American and coalition forces were operating in. On the other side of the curtain, it has been repeated many times when attempting to deal with the Soviet Union, Russian Federation, or People’s Republic of China that those governments do not understand the constraints and pressures of democratic political systems. The United States and others will continue to engage in Kremlinology, both of the Kremlin itself, and the general principal of watching the internal politics of foreign powers, but analysts and policy-makers must be cognizant of the assumptions and pitfalls inherent in such endeavors.