kremlinology

Kremlinology is the study and analysis of the Soviet government, and subsequently the Russian government, and their policies. The term emerged during the Cold War to describe a method of inference developed in response to the opacity and secrecy of the Soviet political system. Named after the Kremlin, the seat of the former Soviet government, the discipline was pioneered by the works of Boris Nicolaevsky and Franz Borkenau, among other scholars. By extension, Kremlinology is sometimes used to denote attempts to understand the inner workings of any secretive organization or decision-making process through the interpretation of indirect or symbolic evidence, for example in analyses of contemporary North Korea.

Sovietology, by contrast, refers to the broader interdisciplinary study of the Soviet Union as a political, economic, social, and ideological system. Scholars in these fields are distinct from transitologists, who study legal, economic and social transitions from communism to market capitalism.