Communist regimes are very secretive concerning how their states are organized. This goes for the historical Soviet Union as well as contemporary China. In effect, until the fall of East European communism in 1989-91, researchers faced great problems figuring out the facts. How was communism organized? Few people knew, and those who knew wouldn’t tell. 

Today, three decades’ worth of archives-based research is slowly accumulating into a new map of the communist state. However, this development is happening within native-language historical research. Meanwhile, the political science agenda remains largely unreformed.  

At a time when students need to better understand China, Russia, and the quagmires of post-communist reforms, much new knowledge about historical communist regimes sits unused, says Astrid Hedin.

In effect, political science curricula need an upgrade. Textbooks on comparative politics tend to fall back on one of three outmoded lines of analysis, all of which are misleading. They reduce differences between communist regimes and liberal democracies to single aspects, such as the organization of the economy. They fail to teach students about the distinctive administrative doctrines and practices of Soviet-type states. And they compare post-communist countries not with their own history, but with an envisioned future as liberal democracies. In effect, scholarly inquiry gets stuck in a loop of ‘traveling problems’ and ‘conceptual stretching’ (Sartori 1970, 1991).