Politics, paradigms, and intelligence failures: why so few predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Preface -- Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Predicting Political Change -- 1. Theories of Political Change and Prediction of Change: Methodological Problems -- Methodological Problems of Tracking Changes in a Collective Belief System -- The Dimensions of a Collective Belief System: Existential Imperatives as Validity Claims -- Changing the Collective Belief System: The Process of Delegitimation -- Activating the Process of Delegitimation: Trigger Conditions of Change -- The Durability of Legitimacy: Personal and Systemic Factors of Maintenance -- Legitimacy of the Soviet Union: The Theory and Politics of a Concept -- Rational Choice Theory and Soviet Legitimacy: Coercion and Preference Falsification -- 2. Oligarchic Petrification or Pluralistic Transformation: Paradigmatic Views of the Soviet Union in the 1970s -- The Totalitarian Model: Oligarchic Petrification and Final Doom -- The Revisionist Model: Pluralistic Transformation and Final Convergence -- Revising the Revisionist View of the Soviet Union: Oligarchic Degeneration and Ideological Assertion in the Late Brezhnev Period -- 3. Paradigms and the Debate on Relations with the Soviet Union: Détente, New Internationalism, and Neoconservatism -- The Realpolitik View of Détente: Securing American National Interests from a Declining Position of Power -- The New Internationalist View of Détente: Superpowers Working Together for a Moral Universe -- The Soviet View of Détente: Improving the "Correlation of Forces -- The Neoconservative View of Détente: Outmaneuvering the United States -- Afghanistan and the Triumph of Neoconservatism -- 4. The Reagan Administration and the Soviet Interregnum: Accelerating the Demise of the Communist Empire.