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

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

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

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

Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson · 19 May 2015 · 945pp · 292,893 words

had confirmed that even she had little to go on, and what she did hear contradicted itself from hour to hour. It had all become Kremlinology. Back in the heyday of the Soviet Union, the only way for Westerners to guess what was going on there was to look at the

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

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet

by Edward Luce · 13 May 2025 · 612pp · 235,188 words

in presidential campaigns. But they were a relatively minor call on his time compared to his unceasing machinations behind the Iron Curtain. His grasp of Kremlinology had always been deeper than his feel for US politics. The peaceful collapse of the USSR and the West’s Cold War victory helped consummate

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It

by Cory Doctorow · 6 Oct 2025 · 313pp · 94,415 words

other subjects are his true feelings, transient blurts, or acts of calculated image-crafting. Stage Three: A Giant Pile of Shit Rather than playing Twitter Kremlinology, let’s instead look at how Musk’s handling of Twitter post-acquisition is an example of how an enshittification speedrun can boomerang on the

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

by Tim Shipman · 30 Nov 2017 · 721pp · 238,678 words

it allowed Davis and Hammond to be pictured together. ‘What mattered more was the photo,’ a minister said. ‘Because everyone was trying to do their Kremlinology and saying, “Davis is in one corner and Hammond is in the other.” And they weren’t.’ Davis’s support emboldened Hammond to push things