It will surprise no one to learn that in certain academic and intellectual circles, I am not taken seriously. Masks slip nevertheless, and even political scientists, that proud and wary bunch, have stooped to ask me – me! – questions whose answers they themselves might be expected to know. Here are some:

"Is there really a Bulgaria?" "What's Zimbabwe?" "Is Belgrade in Belgium?" "Well, at that time I'd gone back to college." (This in response to a question of my own: "Did you know Egypt and Syria became a single country in the late 1950's?")

So perhaps it's only a matter of time before I am asked about the Kremlin. Is it nice, how's the food, do they have wheelchair access, are the signs in English and Spanish, etc. etc. I have not been to the Kremlin. But I do use the word "Kremlinology" a lot.

Actually I use the small-k form, mainly in conversation with my coworkers, who like me wonder chronically who our next manager is going to be. Our bosses are appointed from afar, often serve from afar, and usually on an interim basis. We have no say in their appointment, they have little effect on our work, and we have no idea whether they impress their own higher-ups. My coworkers, none of whom is a political scientist, know what I am talking about and are amused by my usage. We enjoy the speculation, and when it comes to predictive success, we are all tied for last. Was big-K Kremlinology like that? Is it now like that? And is it even a science?

The answer to that last one is: well, sorta, maybe. Falsifiable hypotheses can be presented, kinda. At best, it's probably like meteorology. You can't perform laboratory experiments but you can predict weather retrospectively, or try. You might look up all atmospheric data for Iowa for July 31, 2012 B.C., stick it in your model, and see if it correctly returns the observed weather for Dubuque for July 30, 2012 B.C. And if it doesn't, the rationalizations tumble forth. The data fed to the model were inaccurate. The data were incomplete. They would've been complete if we had Nebraska data too. But Nebraska wasn't with the program. Or somebody with an agenda hid or changed the Nebraska data. On and on.

Since I am old enough to be expected to, I am trying to remember the halcyon Kremlinologists. I think there actually were some. The, uh, science once flew, whether or not it worked. I suspect it glides now. I imagine the State Department (and quite a few of its foreign opposite numbers) still has a stable of knowledgeable folks who vigorously debate Russia's future and the present. I'll even guess that some of them are damned good at what they do.

But will we ever hear about them? Will they ever, as I suggested in the first of this series, capture the popular imagination? Could they? This could be a science whose predictive power is diminished by visibility, whose predictions, if widely known, would at once provoke countermeasures from the people whose activities are being predicted.

(1/18/13)