Beating Soviet Swords into Sovietological Ploughshares

This chapter describes the influences that inclined scholars in the field to recast their subject in civilian terms. Sovietologists belonged to a small, low-prestige field of economics. They were hired and promoted by their departmental colleagues working in the other fields of economics, and stood a higher chance of being treated favorably if their research could be seen as dealing with the issues of interest for the larger discipline, such as growth and economic development.