Merle Fainsod Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Merle Fainsod (1907–1972) was a prominent American scholar in the field of Soviet studies. He taught at Harvard University for forty years and produced influential works that described and analyzed the Soviet system.

Fainsod was educated at Washington University in St. Louis and at Harvard University, where he received a doctorate in 1932. He joined the Harvard faculty, and in addition to serving as a professor of government, he worked in various positions in the U.S. government (1936–1943) and served as the director of the Harvard Russian Research Center (1959–1964) and of the Harvard Library (1964–1972). His dedication to the university led one colleague to describe him as “Harvard’s man for all seasons,” and his teaching influenced a whole generation of students, many of whom would make their own contributions to Soviet studies.

Fainsod produced a number of important works. International Socialism and the World War (1935) analyzed the downfall of the Second Socialist International and was praised as a work of political history and as an essay on political theory. Smolensk under Soviet Rule (1958), based on a unique archive of Soviet documents captured by the Germans in World War II (1939–1945), detailed the inner workings of the Stalinist dictatorship. Fainsod also wrote dozens of articles on Soviet politics and society.

His most important work, however, was How Russia Is Ruled, originally published in 1953. Drawing on a unique source of data from interviews with Russian émigrés in Europe, Fainsod presented a detailed picture of life in the Soviet Union, including both its political institutions and its social structure. Described as a paradigmatic volume, How Russia Is Ruled emphasized the totalitarian aspects of the Soviet Union under Stalin, including the centralization of leadership, repression, suppression of opposition, and the deification of the leadership. Terror, however, was the lynchpin of the system. In addition, through use of data from interviews, he focused on inequality within the Soviet Union and the emergence of a hierarchical structure in a political system that ostensibly stood for equality of all. He also highlighted how loyalty to the Soviet system was weakest among the workers and peasants, the very classes supposed to be served by the Communist Party. How Russia Is Ruled, path breaking as one of the first empirical analyses of the Soviet Union as it really functioned and drawing on survey data, became the preeminent text in the field, and Fainsod’s methods and insights would shape the field of Soviet studies.

Some suggested that changes in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953 made some of Fainsod’s assessments dated. As a result, his classic work was extensively revised, was retitled How the Soviet Union Is Governed (1979), and included Jerry Hough, one of his former students, as a coauthor. Unlike Fainsod’s original work, this volume emphasized that many features of Soviet politics and society were comparable with those in Western democratic states. Its arguments, as well as the fact that it was published with Fainsod’s name on it, generated controversy within the field.

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