The Rusty Curtain: Anatoly Chernyaev, Georgi Arbatov, and the Foundations of the Soviet Collapse, 1970-1979
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Douglas Forsyth, Advisor "It seems the Western interpreters of Marxism are right when they say it is an outdated gospel."Such a harsh condemnation of communist ideology might be expected from some persecuted Soviet dissident or perhaps a war-drumming functionary in Washington.However, this quote is from none other than Anatoly Chernyaev, a high-level apparatchik working for the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who found himself disillusioned with the state of Soviet society in the 1970s.In much the same way, Georgi Arbatov, the director of the Soviet Institute for the Study of the USA and Canada, declared that, "one had a particularly sickening feeling inside because of the intolerable propaganda."From these perceptions of the Soviet Union in the 1970s, Chernyaev and Arbatov would rise to become personal foreign policy advisors to Mikhail Gorbachev and active reformers in the 1980s.The current restrictions on research in Russia have turned the personal writings of Chernyaev and Arbatov into resources of nearly exclusive importance on the history of the Soviet Union in the 1970s.Not only were Chernyaev and Arbatov highly placed individuals within the Soviet government, they were remarkably intelligent, creative, and observant men who recorded their thoughts, impressions, and memories of the Soviet Union as it was before the implosion of the communist system.Secondly, Chernyaev and Arbatov recognized how the Soviet Union had gone astray and recorded evidence of its waywardness for posterity.Lastly, Chernyaev and Arbatov's realizations in the 1970s as to the bankruptcy of the entire Soviet apparatus, coupled with their unique positions within that apparatus, specifically v To Mom, my first teacher, and Dad, whose sacrifices made that education possible, and to the "good fight."vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, this is God's thesis, not mine.He wrote it, not me.I was asked to endure many months of uncertainty, anxiety, and arduous work, but in the end, He is the one who brought the project together.There is no way I could have written this thesis alone.Secondly, I want to thank my family for supporting me in my study of History, especially my Mom and Dad who placed great value on my education and made great sacrifices to provide transformative educational instruction for me and my two brothers and sister.So many people have left their mark on this work through their vocation as professional academics.A special thanks to Douglas Forsyth for sticking with me through the dark days of this project and for helping me to see it through to completion.A very warm thank you also to Beth Griech-Polelle for jumping on my thesis committee and helping me to see how my project could come together.Thank you both for trusting me and believing that I was capable of getting the job done.A
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".