kremlinology Concepts

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall

by Peter Millar · 1 Oct 2009 · 220pp · 88,994 words

given by other politburo members, eagerly watched by those of us who styled ourselves – like Connie in John LeCarré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy trilogy – Kremlinologists. We would hatch theories as to what speech on which occasion, which nuance and what announcement of policy gave hints as to who might be

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of power hoping for a chance to step into the big office, if they didn’t fall off their perch first. As a result every Kremlinologist in Moscow was constantly on the watch for changes in television programming – a switch from regular broadcasts to classical music was a surefire indicator someone

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had all the hallmarks of a death, but was it Chernenko’s or Tikhonov’s. Or what about the third possibility – much discussed amongst the Kremlinologists of late – that Chernenko would simply step down citing ill health and pass on the mantle to one of the relatively unknown younger men? That

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the old comrades’ kiss – just as they had done in Brezhnev’s day – even if those of us who considered Soviet kisses another branch of Kremlinology couldn’t help but notice that Gorbachev puckered up as if kissing a lemon. Only a week later US President Ronald Reagan visited West Berlin

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words

platforms, creators spent less time making compelling content and more on deciphering the opaque “rules” of the algorithm, a process Doctorow likened to “useless platform Kremlinology.” At the broadest level, the growing reliance on algorithms disrupted traditional pathways for cultural discovery. In the past, young people sought guidance from elders who

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. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “People tend to watch”: McGrady, “What We Discovered on ‘Deep YouTube.’ ” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “useless platform Kremlinology”: Doctorow, “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “Given my understanding”: Matthew Yglesias, “The Case Against Meta,” Slow Boring, August 29, 2022

The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

by Richard McGregor · 8 Jun 2010

politics, mainly through study of the pioneering model in the former Soviet Union, and the mini-industry in academia, think-tanks and journalism known as Kremlinology. The collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s took with it much of the deep knowledge of communist systems. Sinology has always been

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the state-controlled media, let alone any discussion of how they arrive at decisions. The membership of these groups can only be deduced by painstaking Kremlinological compilations from scouring the Chinese press, sometimes over years. ‘The only instance in the entire post-Mao era in which the [Chinese] media listed the

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demand freedom, 30, 80 on local officials, 180 judges, 15, 24, 25, 93, 114, 137 June 4 protest see Tiananmen Square massacre Justice Bureau, 190 Kremlinology, 18 Kuomintang, 123–5 labour law, 214 Ladany, Laszlo, 77 Lai Changxing, 159 law firms, Party control of, 23 lawyers, 15, 25, 30, 265 Party

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order

by Rush Doshi · 24 Jun 2021 · 816pp · 191,889 words

Soviet Union, notes the journalist Richard McGregor, and they benefited from and invested in “the mini-industry in academia, think-tanks and journalism known as Kremlinology.”9 But “the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s took with it much of the deep knowledge of communist systems,” with a

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–89, 302. See also North Korea; South Korea Korean War, 273–74 Kosovo War, 65–66, 68, 80, 91–92, 111, 132–33, 164–65 Kremlinology, 26 Kristof, Nicholas, 311 Krugman, Paul, 154 Kyrgyzstan, 129, 132 Ladany, Lazlow, 39–41 Lampton, David, 34 Laos, 125–26, 204–5 Latin America, 23

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink

by Taylor Downing · 23 Apr 2018 · 400pp · 121,708 words

observers of events behind the closed doors of the Politburo and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were known as Kremlinologists. They tried hard to figure out who was on his way up and who was on his way down in the secretive world of the

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Soviet hierarchy. The Kremlinologists were out in force at Brezhnev’s funeral. The dignitaries at the funeral included Vice President George Bush and Secretary of State George Shultz, West

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of the senior leadership of the Soviet Union had been of concern for some time and was not just the subject of much speculation by Kremlinologists looking in from the outside and trying to follow the ups and downs. In March 1983, the elderly members of the Politburo discussed in secret

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of action 181–2, 183–5, 186–7, 216 Soviet propaganda disaster 176–7, 180 US response 169–79, 187–8 Kosygin, Aleksei 68–9 Kremlinologists 37, 214 Kryuchkov, Vladimir Aleksandrovich 74, 75, 80, 127, 229, 255, 279, 281, 282, 333 Kuklinski, Colonel 110–11 Kulikov, Marshal Viktor 248 Kuntsevo Clinic

The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made

by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas · 28 Feb 2012 · 1,150pp · 338,839 words

“what a bunch of bastards the Soviets were” but then he would say, “but we’ve got to deal with them.” Like his tutors in Kremlinology, Kennan and Bohlen, Harriman believed that the Soviets were paranoid, dangerous, yet ultimately conservative and not eager to start a war by invading Europe. Harriman

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover

by Katrina Vanden Heuvel and William Greider · 9 Jan 2009 · 278pp · 82,069 words

onrush of recovered memory and acknowledged the existence of the tapes and transcripts. Such secrecy has spawned the Fed-watching industry, a racket reminiscent of Kremlinology, in which every institutional twitch is scrutinized for clues to policy changes. Fed watchers, many of them recent alumni of the central bank, “earn” salaries

A United Ireland: Why Unification Is Inevitable and How It Will Come About

by Kevin Meagher · 15 Nov 2016

was appointed, like Jim Prior, or Peter Brook, but there was little political buy-in at the time to progress the dialogue they sought. The Kremlinology is instructive. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the Northern Ireland brief was a political backwater, with ministers expected to remain wedded to the grim

Girlfriend in a coma

by Douglas Coupland · 19 Feb 1998

of drifting, Linus returned in late 1992.In that time he'd become more remote than ever. "Reading his facial expressions is an exercise in Kremlinology," Hamilton said. "Direct inquiry's no help: Gee,Linus,you'resoremote thesedays-gee,what'sthereason?"Discussion was awkward indeed, and in the end it was

The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund

by Anita Raghavan · 4 Jun 2013 · 575pp · 171,599 words

the past two weeks, ever since the jury had started its deliberations, word of the jury’s lunch plans took on a form of legal Kremlinology. As long as the jury was ordering lunch, deliberations would likely drag into the afternoon. At 10 a.m., the jury foreman handed back the