Interview with Valerie Bunce, Part 1

This post is the first part of an interview with Valerie Bunce who is the emeritus Aaron Binenkorb Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. She has long been a role model of mine for the way her work asks big questions and comes up with big answers. She is one of the very few scholars of Eastern Europe whose work successfully bridged the communist era and the postcommunist era, something we discuss below. I was thus particularly interested in asking her how the study of Eastern Europe looked prior to 1989, but I also wanted to know about its evolution since then and her view of area studies.

The interview took place on 11 November 2024, 27 January 2025, and 12 February 2025. Because of its length, it is broken into several parts. Part 1 here focuses on her training and work on the communist regime. Part 2 gets into her research on the postcommunist era. Part 3 covers more general issues about the region and the profession. I’d add that the questions and structure of the interview are inspired by Munck and Snyder’s Passion, Craft, and Method in Comparative Politics, a book I’ve discussed earlier on this blog.

PART 1: Origins and the Communist Era

Intellectual Formation and Training

Q: How did you first get interested in politics?

Bunce: I came from a very political, working-class family. FDR would have been anointed a saint if my parents had been at all religious (which they were not). There was a lot of support in my family for leftist policies but falling easily within the parameters of welfare state capitalism. I grew up during the Cold War, which meant that the one country that grabbed my attention, aside from the US, was the Soviet Union. Also influential is that I grew up in a Sociology 101 working class, ethnic neighborhood. There were refugees from Germany and Italy, for example, but most important from Armenia. I was very affected by their reflections on the genocide -though the topic, as you might imagine, was very loaded for them. In addition, I had a very dominant and difficult father, which I suspect sensitized me to a whole bunch of issues associated with authoritarianism.

Q: What did your parents do? What sort of political discussions did you have growing up?

Bunce: We talked about politics a lot while I grew up. Looking back, I am struck by two things. First, my mother and I were as involved in these discussions as my father and my brother if not more so. Somehow, the well-known gender hierarchy of the 1950s was less present in my family. I think my mother was the main reason why that was the case. She was her own person, and she was always ready to take her seat at the table. Second, my parents, who had grown up in a relatively racist environment (in Indiana), were transformed by the civil rights movement. Their eyes were opened to racism. In this way, as in others, the 1950s was not “as advertised.” It was a time of ferment, not just conformism. The civil rights revolution, which laid the basis for so many other societal revolutions that followed, disequilibrated the status quo - as did, in my family at least, the Army-McCarthy hearings. My earliest political memories were my parents listening to those hearings on the radio and my mother crying when Stevenson lost the 1956 election.

My father worked in the auto industry on the assembly line (I grew up in Pontiac, Michigan). He went to night school for many years at Wayne State University and eventually completed an engineering degree, but then he had a massive heart attack and never worked again. I was 12 when that happened. Thereafter, life was very hard for my family. I paid my own way through college at the University of Michigan.

Q: What did you think about the USSR and the Cold War at this time?

Bunce: I worried a lot about nuclear war as we all did in my “boomer” generation. I did my fair share of “ducks and covers” in grade school. One impact of living day in and day out in the “hothouse” of the Cold War that has been under-appreciated is how much that experience - living on the precipice of nuclear annihilation - paved the way for the political and cultural rebellions of the 1960s. We all felt that we had nothing to lose and everything to experience before we were all extinguished by the bomb. We all had to think a lot about the Soviet Union during those years, if we were the least bit political. In my case, Eastern Europe was also of interest because of my neighborhood (we had some Polish families there as well as the Germans, Italians, Mexicans and Armenians). I also picked up some ambivalence about how we should think about the Soviet Union from the Armenians. They were not pro-Soviet, but they did appreciate the fact that the Soviet Union had preserved an Armenian Republic.

The first thing I ever published was in connection with the Cuban Missile crisis. I wrote an op-ed that was published in the local paper about how the candidacy of Barry Goldwater put us on the brink of nuclear war. I was 15.

Q: When did you begin studying Eastern Europe? How did you get interested in the region and how did you learn more about it?

Bunce: My first love was the Soviet Union. I took an innovative, interdisciplinary undergraduate course, “Survey of the Soviet Union” while I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. It was taught by a dynamic group of young professors. I was a junior and only took the course because my best friend had decided to take it, and the course fit in my schedule (which was not easy - I worked 20-25 hours a week when I was an undergraduate). I experienced a genuine epiphany - all I wanted midway through that course was to go to the Soviet Union, study every aspect of that country, and then write and teach about its politics. My epiphany, in short, was that in the future I would be an academic who specialized in Soviet politics. One of the professors in the course was Zvi Gitelman (his first year at Michigan). He was wonderful to me. I was one of a hundred and fifty or so students in the class, yet he never failed to answer my many questions during his office hours. He also agreed to give me a follow-up, independent study on Soviet politics during the summer that followed that course. He even accommodated my work schedule. The vast majority of professors at that time would have been unwilling to be so generous with an undergraduate.

But where did Eastern Europe come in? I went on to graduate school in political science at Michigan and married a fellow student, also a budding “Sovietologist”, at the end of my second year. We wanted to take a “cool” honeymoon but lacked the financial resources to do so (these were the days before there were generous “graduate student packages”; funding, except for language study courtesy of the U.S. government, was largely semester by semester and many of us had part-time jobs, even when we were teaching assistants). Limited resources (especially a problem for going to the Soviet Union because of requirements to exchange significant amounts of hard currency daily), plus the very real limits on where you could go in the Soviet Union in 1972 (and if you could get a visa), led us to opt for “Soviet light.” We backpacked throughout Eastern Europe for nearly three months. While visas were not automatic for Eastern Europe as well (though Yugoslavia was easier than the rest), there was a decent supply of campgrounds, even near major cities. We were also less restricted in where we could go and required to spend less money daily since we were camping.

Once again, I fell in love - especially with Yugoslavia (its beauty and those policies, such as non-alignment! Workers self-management!), but also Hungary and Bulgaria. When I came back to Ann Arbor, I was lucky enough to receive a language fellowship to support my studies. The requirement that year was to study an Eastern European language (the idea was to force students to move out of the Soviet ghetto). I wanted to do Bulgarian, in part, I confess, because it seemed to be easier to learn than Serbo-Croatian and certainly Hungarian. The Bulgarian teacher was on leave that semester, so I took (in addition to my Russian) Serbo-Croatian. This was a time, I should add, when Yugoslavia was popular with the left and with dissidents in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It was seen as the great alternative to the Soviet model.

I never thought I had to be either an Eastern European or a Soviet specialist. Why not both? That was unusual at the time. Scholars tended to be one or the other - though, it is interesting to remember, Zvi Gitelman was an exception. Most students opted for the Soviet Union, because it was the “big guy” in the bloc. Every political science department had a Soviet specialist. On the other hand, very few departments, except very large ones with federally-funded Soviet and Eastern European programs, were interested in hiring an Eastern Europeanist. I was also distinctive in being a comparativist. I never wanted to do just one place; I was always skeptical of the value and validity of doing just one case. Finally, I found it rather silly that political science programs drew a thick line between domestic and international politics. Students were forced to choose one or the other, and the great majority of scholars in IR ignored domestic politics entirely. However, the chair of my dissertation committee, Bill Zimmerman, was a welcome exception to this unfortunate norm. I remember, for example, that he offered courses on both the foreign policy of the Soviet Union and the domestic politics of the Soviet Union. As his published work indicates, moreover, he saw them as related to one another. He was also becoming more interested in Yugoslavia while I was studying at Michigan. He was a person who was open to changing the direction of his research. That made a big impression on me.

There was another way in which I deviated from the norm in the field. I did not buy into the clear hierarchy that placed the Soviet Union first and Eastern Europe a distant second. Why bother knowing anything about the “colonies”? All you needed to know about was the core - the periphery was just derivative. It was very hard, for example, for scholars to imagine a scenario in which Eastern Europe influenced the Soviet Union (but Zvi Gitelman, once again, was an exception, given his work on the diffusion of innovation from Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union).

It was partly because of my irritation with these biases (as a woman, of course, in an extremely male-dominated academy, I was very aware of patriarchy - though the term was not in play at that time) that I wrote “The Empire Strikes Back” in the early 1980s. In that article, I leveled the playing field of the Soviet bloc. I spoke of bargaining among states, not orders (ukazi) issued by the regional hegemon, and even Eastern Europe’s ability, given the structure of power and resources within the bloc, to blackmail the Soviet Union. Many of my friends in Eastern Europe were very mad at me about that piece. They hated the argument that Eastern Europe benefited (in any way) from Soviet domination.

Q: What inspired you to go to graduate school in political science and how did you end up remaining at Michigan? Typically, undergraduates are supposed to leave the nest.

Bunce: Michigan was really one of the best places to do Soviet and Eastern European studies in the mid-1970s. The only other options were really Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, Yale and Columbia (though the Eastern European side was thin in all these places, except Berkeley). I had thought I would go to Chicago, because I was interested in working with Jeremy Azrael and because I just loved that city, but two things got in my way: 1) I wanted an Eastern Europeanist on the faculty and Chicago didn’t have one, and; 2) I married someone in medical school at the University of Michigan right after I graduated with my BA (I know my marriages are getting confusing - this was my first husband, whom I left for my second while in graduate school!). There was another reason why I stayed put in Ann Arbor. I graduated from Michigan as a believer in both quantitative work and behavioralism. Michigan was the only place that combined strengths in that area with strengths in Soviet and Eastern European studies. Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Chicago - they were all behind the curve in these methodologies. They were quite tradition-bound.

Q: What was graduate study at Michigan like at the time? What sort of training did you get and who were the major figures in the department?

Bunce: It was wonderful. I thrived. I benefited from two terrific, somewhat overlapping intellectual and social communities: the graduate students in Political Science and the graduate students from a range of disciplines associated with the Soviet and Eastern European Studies Program. I fit in well; I learned a tremendous amount in and outside class; I liked the combination of studying languages, statistics and substantive political science; I liked being a teaching assistant; and I enjoyed the two years I spent writing my dissertation. There were several things that were very different about graduate school back then (1970-1976). One was that we really valued the process of becoming an academic. Aside from obvious financial limitations, we were in no hurry to “finish graduate school,” “get our dissertations done.” As an aside, it is interesting that we felt this way, despite a terrible job market. There had been a lot of hiring in Political Science during the second half of the 1960s, so available positions were few and far between. Moreover, the bad job situation was unlikely to change for some time, because so many faculty with jobs were so young.

I remember a colleague of mine at Northwestern, who was about 10 years older than I was, told me that when he finished his doctorate, he called up a few places where he wanted to go and let them know that he was available(!). Sure enough, one of them - Northwestern - arranged for a quick interview (just him) and hired him almost on the spot. By contrast, I would guess that at least half my graduate class never found an academic position.

Also different was the sheer amount of coursework we did - four years! Yes, it is true that I had stats and languages, in addition to political science courses, but still I think I took 14 or so courses in political science over those four years. What a luxury to be given the opportunity to read so widely and to learn so much! I took, I am guessing, eight courses in comparative politics, three in American politics and political behavior and three in international relations. In addition, we had a cognate requirement which in my case meant three courses in Russian and Eastern European history and two courses in Russian literature.

Q: In the acknowledgments to your first book, you mention Bill Zimmerman who had to drag you “kicking and screaming” through the dissertation. Can you say more about that?

Bunce: I was quite a rebellious person at that stage in my life. I was very much a sixties person. That meant, among other things, that I did not take kindly to people, especially men telling me what to do (note that there were two women - both recent hires - on the faculty of the University of Michigan while I was a student in Political Science - and about 60 or so males). This was, if you can believe it, a better gender ratio than most political science departments in the country. For example, there were no women on the faculty of Northwestern when I interviewed in 1977. So, Bill and I had our ups and downs - but Bill stayed the course with me. He contributed a LOT to my intellectual development. I am thankful to him.

Q: You also mention Bob Putnam’s enthusiasm as like “opening presents at Christmas”. Can you elaborate on that too?

Bunce: Robert Putnam came to Michigan when I was a junior, and I took the first course he taught - comparative politics for juniors and seniors. WOW! I had never met an academic who was so in love with research questions and findings - not just his (he was not an arrogant person), but everyone’s. He was in love with political science - no doubt about it - and he especially liked middle range, rigorous work that dealt with important questions (note that he recognized, unlike some social scientists, that the two could go together). He practically hyperventilated when he lectured. His enthusiasm was infectious. He was also quite egalitarian, which made his classes rich in give-and-take. He didn’t draw distinctions based on gender or academic level. I served for a brief time - maybe the summer after my first year in graduate school - as his research assistant. It was an exciting experience. I felt that I was part of a research project. Graduate students who worked on the 1972 election study and on the Correlates of War project (two big sources of funding at the time) referred to themselves as “slugs”. When I work for Bob Putnam, I did not feel like a slug - I felt like a co-investigator.

Q: Who were the authors or books that influenced you at the time and made a difference in how you thought about politics?

Bunce: The biggest influence was Jerry Hough, who, in his groundbreaking book, The Soviet Prefects, had carved out a distinctive niche as someone who treated the Soviet Union as a logical, functional political economic system. Jerry was analytical, not hysterical. I am remembering as I write this that the first review I received from the APSR for a statistical article on leadership succession in the Soviet Union argued strenuously against publishing “this junk.” He (it was clear it was a he - and statistically speaking, extremely likely) said he hoped he would never find out who the author was. Really!

Returning to Jerry Hough: he “normalized” the Soviet Union (one hates to use that verb in the age of Trump). Jerry asked some great (and normal) questions, such as how the Soviet system actually functioned on the ground and why it had proven to be so durable. Jerry took courses at Michigan while I was there (he was a Professor at Toronto at the time and had won a fellowship from NSF I think to do postgraduate work in political science), and I was lucky enough to spend a fair amount of time with him. Other influences - hard to remember! I would list Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington Political Power: USA/USSR, Barrington Moore’s Social Origins book, articles by Phil Converse and Donald Stokes on voting behavior, Graham Allison on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Jack Walker’s work on the diffusion of innovation, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Soviet Bloc, T.H. Rigby, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Hugh Seton-Watson’s history of Eastern Europe, Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, Alec Nove’s work on the Soviet economy, Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, and Dankwart Rustow’s classic article on transitions to democracy (which came in handy much later in my career!).

Q: What events in the political world were influencing your thinking in those years?

Bunce: So many - the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (that was one of those events that you remember exactly where you were when you heard about it); the rise and fall of Nixon and the Watergate hearings; and of course and above all, Vietnam. It was a time of governments (democratic and authoritarian) acting badly and citizens taking to the streets to demand change. I remember we always used to say during that time - yes, communism was bad, but what about all the terrible things that were done in the name of anti-communism? We were in effect regime orphans. There were few places to look for inspiration. As I mentioned earlier, Yugoslavia was one of the places.

Q: A lot of recent scholars look back on the period when you were studying as a golden age for researchers because of government support for the study of Eastern Europe. Did it feel that way at the time?

Bunce: That take on the early 1970s makes me laugh! As I mentioned, we did not have graduate “packages” like we see today; we certainly did not have summer support (let alone dissertation completion support); it was very hard to get funding for our dissertations, let alone surmount all the obstacles to go abroad; and “outside” funding was quite limited - mainly language study (the National Defense Foreign Language fellowships). In addition, we taught a lot more students for a lot less money - and we never knew if we would get a TAship until the last minute. I was lucky, though. I was good at languages, so I could use NDFLs to support my graduate study for 4 years (that was the maximum), and I was in a good position to take advantage of the shifting emphasis in government support towards graduate training in Eastern European languages. Another piece of luck - I had some wonderful, short-term research jobs. The pay was nice, but the experience was invaluable. One of the best things about it was that you had no choice but to take jobs often in areas very distant from your chosen specialization. For example, I had jobs analyzing U.S. voting behavior data, classifying Congressional legislation, tracing down the details of Western European economic policies, translating and coding interviews with Soviet emigres in Israel, and collecting migration and employment data by republic in Yugoslavia. When I look at graduate education today, I see a much more limited and narrow experience.

Research: Core Ideas and their Reception

Leadership Succession

Q: Your dissertation project and first book, Do New Leaders Make a Difference?, was a comparison of leadership succession in the US and the communist bloc. How did that project come together?

Bunce: I took a course with Donald Stokes on research design and did what I have often done throughout my career - I wanted to see what would happen if I treated what were usually dependent variables as independent variables (and vice-versa). At that time, everyone wrote about elections and successions as dependent variables. The big question was explaining who won. I decided to look, instead, at how they affected the system and public policy and use that impact to speak to some larger questions, such as the performance of the system. In addition, there were very few studies at that time that compared elections or successions, let alone elections with successions (aside from Political Power: USA/USSR). The paper I wrote for the seminar (my second year in graduate school) served as the foundation for my dissertation, which later became my first book.

Q: In my view, the project stands out from work at the time in a number of ways and I wanted to ask you about each of them. First, you juxtapose a structuralist approach to politics to one that posits actor indispensability. My sense is that when you were writing structuralist approaches were relatively dominant and have been until relatively recently. How much resistance was there to your emphasis on the role of individuals?

Bunce: Oddly enough, structural analyses were not dominant at that time, though they were in evidence. At Michigan, they were looked down upon, because they were too “vague” and they did not nail down who did what and why. I was more friendly to structural analyses than most people I had read or knew, probably because I was friendly to class analysis because of my background. I was also a political activist, participating in protests against Vietnam and in a movement to unionize graduate teaching assistants. Activism along these lines led easily to thinking in structural terms.

Q: Another unique aspect was the juxtaposition of the US and the Eastern bloc. I know there was some work on economic convergence at the time, but to posit political comparability seems outside of the norm. Was there much pushback on that effort?

Bunce: A LOT of PUSHBACK. People said things like - you can’t compare these things or these places; one country is a normal political system and the other is not! People did not understand the concept of functional equivalence; that is, the need of all political systems, for example, to devise ways to choose and replace leaders. Because they did it in different ways did not mean there was no basis for comparison. In fact, that was why the comparison was useful and interesting.

My first interview was at Princeton, and I got caught in the middle of a shouting match at my presentation between Ed Tufte and Robert Tucker. Tucker asked me why I would do such a silly and useless project (reacting not just to the comparison but also the use of numbers - which was unheard of in Soviet Studies) and Tufte jumped in and said - my project was a good deal better and certainly less silly and more useful than anything Tucker had done. Later, when I met with Stephen Cohen in his office, he ignored me while talking on the phone with Jerry Hough. Then Hough asked to speak with me, because Cohen mentioned I was interviewing. Cohen did not like that. What a terrible experience I had at Princeton. I probably shouldn’t add this, but when Tucker received an award from what was then ASEEES (the interdisciplinary academic organization of Soviet and Eastern European specialists - the first area studies organization founded in the U.S.), a group of us, all women, were sitting next to each other in the audience. Each of us was looking very angry and slowly realized that we were not alone - that we had all been treated very badly by that man. By badly, I do not mean just intellectually.

Q: As a follow-up, who ended up reading and commenting on the book? Was it mainly Eastern Europeanists or was there engagement from scholars of other regions and especially from Americanists?

Bunce: It was mainly Soviet bloc specialists, but some Americanists as well. I don’t think Western Europeanists had much interest. And there was a very strong generational reaction. Older scholars, more established scholars in the field were very negative. I would say they were angry, which sounds kind of idiotic in the sense that, you know, get a life, but they somehow saw it as an assault on the way they thought work should be done. This was not the first time that I saw academics launch criticisms that were purportedly intellectual in nature, but that were really about worries they had regarding the legitimacy of their work and their status in the academy.

Q: What was their conception of what good work looked like? They must have had some idea.

Bunce: Kremlinology, working from the assumption that the Soviet Union was completely dysfunctional, yet somehow a formidable enemy. This was the contradiction at the base of my work in the Kremlinological tradition. And this is the mid-seventies, long before the country imploded. There was a strong prejudice against using numbers or analyzing the Soviet Union in the context of other countries, authoritarian or democratic. There was also a tendency to blur the distinction between ideal types (the totalitarian model) and the real world of Soviet politics. Finally, debates were about the system as a whole, rather than how it worked. Middle range research was unusual. The idea that you would think about the Soviet Union as a logical system, a system that made sense, given its design, even if you didn't agree with the premises upon which it was built, was heretical. To treat the Soviet political economy as having its own logic (and as a political economy for that matter) really bothered a lot of more senior scholars.

Q: This wasn't a left right divide? There were people on the left like Stephen Cohen or Jerry Hough, people on the right like Brzezinski.

Bunce: Most of the emigres were on the right. And the field was dominated by emigres. Having said that, however, Brzezinski was hard to nail down in an ideological sense. The Soviet Bloc was a nuanced treatment of intra-bloc dynamics (given the data available at the time) and the co-authored book with Samuel Huntington (Political Power: USA/USSR) addressed a lot of basic issues about the organization and practice of politics. My impression is that the addition of the US case was beneficial: it forced a certain practicality and originality in how Soviet politics was analyzed. It was a bold book.

Q: But everyone shared this idea that work should be more qualitative and systemic.

Bunce: It was funny because it had that kind of methodological slant, but it also had a very personal slant. Unlike someone who works on US politics, or whatever, the Soviet Union was the enemy and it was a terrible place. And so that was folded into many analyses, often unconsciously. When I came to Northwestern, there was a guy teaching Soviet politics who was quite strange. I was hired to teach Western European politics, but I realized quickly that I was hired in part (I wasn’t told this directly) to serve as a counterweight and perhaps successor to him. Because of his appeal to undergraduates (he was a hardline anti-communist, as were many of his students, who were often from émigré families, and he was an easy grader), he had very high course enrollments that could justify a “second” course on Soviet and Eastern European politics (which I taught). It was not an easy position for an untenured professor to be in, especially since I often had to cover for him because of his drinking problem. One semester, I substituted for him for several weeks after he fell into the audience while lecturing (he taught from an elevated stage). He later told his favorite students that the KGB had gotten to his orange juice (with a straight face, I gather). He was also not very well-trained to teach those courses. He did not know any Russian, for example. Occupying that odd position was difficult for me, because I was a better fit to teach the courses he was teaching and his students disliked my approach to the course (when I filled in for him) and walked out on me several times. Keep in mind that the Cold War was very much a fact of political life, and many of his students had parents who came from the region. It might sound odd to people now, but none of the senior faculty voiced their concerns about him or their support of me. No one wanted to say anything. They wanted to pretend that all this was normal. Meanwhile, I was very upset, and I had a book and articles to write! And I had to get up to speed about Western Europe, which ostensibly was my academic responsibility.

Not fun!

Q: Did you have a group of people that you saw as allies in that struggle.

Bunce: Jerry Hough was an ally. Stephen Cohen was more mixed because he was a prima donna. And there were issues going on with him. He didn't like numbers at all. Jerry Hough was sympathetic. Bill Zimmerman was supportive. And who else? My support came from comparative politics, not from the area studies people. There were also some junior people - my colleagues who had studied with me at Michigan and Brian Silver. But let me also say - we really didn’t think that much about the idea of having a “supportive environment.” We had our work, our colleagues, our friends. It was quite enough.

Q: How worried were you about tenure and having success in the field? Was that a fear that you had at the time.

Bunce: I wasn't that worried about it. I don't know why. I think that I was naive. I think that I thought, I'm going to be okay; my evaluators will be fair and open to different types of work; I am doing what I am supposed to do in terms of teaching evaluations, service (junior people were not protected in those days), and publications. My generation in the academy was not very ambitious in the sense of obsessing about “getting ahead” and not very focused on ”making it”. We worked hard and we were tickled with the idea of being real, live academics. We didn't think of it as a business, a career-building exercise. We didn’t think about networking or dressing for success (though Sharon Wolchik and I spent some time shopping for interview outfits - we realized our combat boots, jeans and in my case a used 1940s mink coat with padded shoulders were not appropriate garb for trying to get a job). People now are much more purposive, planned, ambitious than we were. I thought (for no good reason) that, if I worked hard, I would get tenure. I was very trusting - I still am.

Q: I think you had the right attitude. That's the right way to view it.

Bunce: But it's not the view that people have now. It's ironic because the academy has more jobs than it had when I was young. It wasn't as though I was certain about getting a job. There were no jobs and they'd gone on a hiring spree in the sixties. And by the time I came along, there were a lot of people in their thirties and forties in the academy and there just weren't that many open positions. And every year, I was applying for one or two jobs in the country. That was it and it was considered lucky, frankly, if there were one or two. It wasn't rational to be as naive as I was. I think there was a kind of a weird baby boom post-war optimism that assumed that it would all work out, if we worked hard. It is possible that we also knew that in the Soviet and Eastern European field, we had alternatives - for example, jobs in the security field. Finally, I think young women in that era were just amazed that we had pulled off a Ph.D. and gotten jobs. We had low expectations and pleasant surprises.

Q: It did work out.

Bunce: Yes, it did. I feel lucky. But there was no reason to assume that I would “luck out”.

Q: Finally, the project combined both a qualitative study of leaders and an interrupted time-series analysis. I know Michigan was known for quantitative work, but my sense is that it was relatively uncommon in Eastern European studies. Were you again outside the mainstream in these quantitative analyses?

Bunce: Completely outside. It was not just that other scholars did not do quantitative work; it was that there was a widespread prejudice against this. I had forgotten about those unpleasant days until I moved to Cornell in 1991. Cornell’s Government Department had held the line against quantitative work for many years. They saw themselves as the “anti-Michigan.” In addition to some faculty members, there were several Cornell PhDs that had been recently hired that carried the torch for qualitative analysis, historical institutionalism and the like. They were quite rigid. While they dressed up their arguments in intellectual garb, the reality was that they were prejudiced against any work that was quantitative. For them it was a question not just of method, but also identity. When I was Director of Graduate Studies and then Chair of the Department, the members of this subculture drove me crazy.

Q: One of the implications you drew from your first book is that the importance of leaders is underestimated in the West and overestimated in the East. Do you think that those misperceptions remain?

Bunce: To some degree. I haven't thought about that, but I was going to insert one thing. I was very influenced by Bob Putnam who was working on political leaders at that time. The things he got into later were very different from what he was working on when he was still at Michigan and when I had opportunities to work with him. More behavioralist types were interested in political leaders then, and there was also this literature on The Making of the President, 1960, and those kinds of breathless accounts of the Presidency that were popular with the public. And now we have, for example, John Meacham and Michael Beschloss telling us that everything is about leadership. That was always there, but there was not much in between - say, leaders as important in a context of other important players and forces. So, in that sense the work I was doing wasn’t done that much, except in the study of democratic politics.

Q: I know Putnam's work from then, but nobody really followed it up. It sort of disappeared, I think, for a long time. It started to come back a bit in this century. He did that work, there's your first book, but I don't feel like there were a lot more people doing the kind of work you're describing, asking “In what sense do leaders matter?” About 15 years ago there was this big paper by some economists called “Do leaders matter?” They looked at deaths of leaders and then what happens as sort of a causal way of thinking about it. That somewhat revived the study of them, but I sense that not many people were doing it.

Bunce: No, they weren't. But I also think it's fair to say that there probably was more diversity then in what people were working on. There was less of an effect of “the literature” and carrying out projects designed to fill in some hole or other. There was less evidence of what I call the Jurassic Park problem - animals stampeding in one direction, then something happens and they turn and stampede in the opposite direction. The 1970 and 1980s had more topical diversity, so there was nothing particularly weird about doing leadership. But it also wasn't what everybody was doing. It was a flatter, broader distribution of subject matter and even methodology.

But I'm trying to think of your earlier question about whether we underestimate how important leaders are in the West and overestimate in the East. That's hard for me to answer because when I wrote that book there wasn't a lot of data on the East. We were guessing, but we were often taking leaders in the East outside of the context within which they competed for power and made decisions. To use a cliché, it was all about them - which was easy to argue, because they were dictatorships. What I was saying in that book is that, both East and West, there was a context shaping what they did and could do, mechanisms and competition. In the West, there was mass politics, elections, institutional constraints on leaders, accountability. Nearly by definition, the “East” - our other - had to be the opposite. None of these constraints were relevant. (though of course that was not true).

Our discussion is taking place during the early stages of Trump’s onslaught on the U.S. government, our civil liberties and political rights and U.S. citizens. We are learning the hard way about how we under-estimated the power of leadership in the United States, the lack of constraints on the Presidency, the limitations of the separation of powers as deterrents on Presidential power.

Q: I just thought it was a fascinating observation about how we have looked at the power of political leaders. And it made me start to think about things. There's this thought experiment that sometimes goes around about US events: How would The New York Times report if the same thing happened in a foreign country? They would report on it very differently if it happened there versus if it happened here. And so, leaders is one of those places where we see them in a different way in another place than we see them at home.

Bunce: Yes, you are right. Your point even extends to prior presidents - the commentary, “If Joe Biden had done this…” I had a project that I didn't end up doing for a variety of reasons. It was about the rhythms of the Presidency - a deepening and temporal extension of the notion of a honeymoon period. I wrote some things about how fixed terms and electoral cycles structure Presidential power, politics and policy over the course of each administration (I started with Kennedy), but I got distracted and started working on other things. But there was a fundamental problem with leadership studies; they rested all-too-often on idiosyncratic premises. This leader, not leaders, right? And that assumption was what I was trying to argue against in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. This or that leader is not as important as leaders in general and the leadership system.

The Communist Era

Q: You had a number of interesting papers on the communist regime that I wanted to ask about. One of them set out the concept of an ideal empire and then showed how the Soviet empire was moving away from that ideal as its satellites were providing fewer benefits at higher costs. Russia’s current attempts to reconstruct its empire certainly don’t seem to meet any of the criteria for an ideal empire, do they?

Bunce: That article, “The Empire Strikes Back,” was the most controversial thing I ever wrote. But think about it: why should the Soviet empire be so much more successful than other empires, especially as they age, rigidify and accumulate costs?

Q: What were the objections to it?

Bunce: Many of my Eastern European friends stopped speaking to me, because I was claiming that Eastern Europe benefited from the Soviet Union. That is the last thing they wanted to hear. People were also very uncomfortable with the word empire. It's interesting now to think about that, given the Russian invasion of Ukraine, beginning in 2014 and all these discussions that are taking place about Russian imperial and colonial politics and all that. But Russia has been an imperial power since Peter! You can also talk about an internal empire; that is, the structure and logic of the multinational Soviet and Russian state, the process by which the Russian empire was reconstructed as the Soviet state and, as Mark Beissinger has argued for the late Soviet period, the transition from Soviet citizens seeing themselves as living within a state (a legitimate political construct) to living within an empire. (when the legitimacy of the Soviet project and its borders had eroded). But people didn't like that article in part because of the numbers; in part because, again, I was arguing that the Soviet Union had a systemic logic to it; and in part because the Soviet Union was getting ripped off by Eastern Europe. A very good friend of mine, Mike Marrese, an economist, was making that argument. I relied heavily on him and his work with Jan Vaňous. But again, that paper was an easy target in a way, because it was one of those arguments (I was drawn to these my entire career) that seemed to be counterintuitive.

Q: I think it's a nice model. You mentioned the attack on Ukraine. It's Russia's current attempt to reconstruct something like an empire. It doesn’t seem to meet your criteria for an ideal empire if you weigh the cost and the benefits.

Bunce: From a rational standpoint, Putin is a fool to be doing this. He is mortgaging the economic future of Russia and its political and economic relations with Europe, among other things. However, the invasion serves to amplify his power at home and abroad. Indeed, he sees the two as inextricably linked. Moreover, downwardly-mobile powers, like Russia, want to be recognized as being more important in international politics than they are. They do so by being disruptive. Trump has fallen for the Russian gambit and that has important implications for the power and cohesion of NATO. Perhaps Putin’s violent assault on Ukraine is not as stupid as it appears. But it is certainly as illegitimate and vile as it appears, and it will generate long-term costs for Russia.

Q: So, you would need another model to explain what's going on now. The cost benefit model of empire doesn't work.

Bunce: Of course, few things are harder to carry out with any precision than assessing costs and benefits, when that calculation requires taking into account all kinds of non-monetary consequences and folding in somehow longer-term, not just short-term effects. But I think the Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe - driven by the imperative of national security and postwar recovery - really made sense. I didn't like it, but it did largely accomplish in the first few decades precisely what was intended. The case for an empire after World War II was so much stronger then than it is now with this idiotic and terrible war in Ukraine and with Russian intimidation in the “near abroad” (and for that matter, a big chunk of the far abroad).

Q: Do you have an explanation for what's going on now?

Bunce: I followed the 2014 invasion carefully. I haven't been following things as much since I retired in 2020. I will say that I do not find the arguments about Russia invading because of worries regarding the EU and NATO to be at all compelling. For example, Russian aggression drove Ukraine to NATO and the EU, not vice-versa. I do think that diffusion-proofing has played a big role. Ukraine moving towards democracy scared Putin, as did the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Euromaidan protests in 2013. What if the democratic virus were to spread to Russia? He has made it clear over the years that he fears diffusion in general and color revolutions in particular.

Q: So, NATO and the EU are a pretext rather than a cause.

Bunce: Exactly. John Mearsheimer just loves to play contrarian, and his talking points, likely unwittingly, adhere closely to the Russian rationale for the war. Ukraine’s shift to the West purportedly endangered Russian security. How exactly, I wonder. For that matter, isn’t Ukraine a sovereign state? How could Ukraine be a “natural” part of Russia? Why did every county in Ukraine (including Crimea) vote for independence in the last days of the Soviet Union? What is the legal justification for violation of state boundaries? The explanations Mearsheimer offered were bogus.

Q: Many scholars were excited by the emergence of Gorbachev and saw him as the key to change. My sense in reading your writing is that you saw him not as a unique great man, but more as a product of Soviet institutions that needed change. Indeed, you wrote some articles making historical comparisons between Gorbachev and Alexander II. Would that be the correct interpretation of your thinking about him?

Bunce: Yes. I see Gorbachev as coming out of the great Russian and Soviet tradition of reformers “from above”. The system gets stuck and cannot do what it needs to do to survive and flourish. The reforms of Peter I, Alexander II and Gorbachev are all examples, and they are similar in function and logic to the Meiji restoration and the Ataturk reforms. But I think that Gorbachev started as a reformer and slid into being a revolutionary. The task before him was much greater than he ever imagined, and the web of institutions holding the state, the government, and the economy together was far more frayed than Gorbachev knew. I remember when Gorbachev gave one of his important speeches in early 1987. Ben Page barged into my office and said: “My God, everything's changing. Gorbachev is wonderful.” I was more cautious. I replied, “Let’s wait a bit. We've been down this road before.” When I was in graduate school, Khrushchev was really a big deal. Obviously, Brezhnev was in power, but there was still an ongoing discussion among specialists about how to think about Khrushchev and his radical and somewhat unpredictable way of governing the Soviet Union. I saw Gorbachev as possibly an early Brezhnev. Brezhnev started with a reformist vision, but that ended when his power was consolidated and the crisis in Czechoslovakia led to the Soviet invasion in 1968. Ben wasn't bringing to the table the comparative perspective I had on “great men,” big reforms and cycles of decay and top down reforms in centralized, authoritarian systems.

Q: The field of communist studies has been criticized for not predicting 1989, but I get a sense that by the 1980s, many saw communism’s days as numbered. How would you characterize the conventional wisdom of regional specialists in political science at that time? Elsewhere I’ve heard you say that with the rise of Solidarity and Tito’s death, it was clear that people were heading for the exits.

Bunce: This is another bugaboo of mine. A lot of us were writing about all the problems of these systems, but almost all of us doing so worked on Eastern Europe. When you focused on the Soviet Union, you thought you were the center of the world. You were, to use a phrase from the financial crisis, too big to fail. Superpowers do not go out of business. Soviet specialists thought that everything - communism, the Soviet Union, the Soviet bloc - lasts forever. The Soviet Union would always be there, and scholars who specialized in Soviet politics would always, as a result, be important. They had a lot invested in the Soviet Union, even as they pointed out the problems the country was facing. Because my work straddled the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, I was less convinced. I was not into over-inflated views of myself and the country I worked on, and I had much less of a vested interest in the durability of the Soviet regime. When you went from, say, Prague to Moscow, Warsaw to Moscow, Budapest to Moscow, Zagreb to Moscow, you could see that the days of Soviet communism were numbered. Moscow and Leningrad were shabby, not dynamic.

Q: People were heading for the exits.

Bunce: Or at least keeping their bags packed in the eventuality. I wrote “The Empire Strikes Back” in the late seventies. When it came out, it was very controversial. It was a struggle to get it published in International Organization. But when I did the research in the late seventies, I thought, hmm, hmm. They can't keep doing this. They can't keep subsidizing the colonies, especially as they are falling behind in their competition with the West. I kept thinking, what's wrong with these people (the Soviet specialists)? They're spending time in Moscow. Look at this place. It's falling apart. One time when I was doing field work in Yugoslavia, I ran into a bunch of Soviet tourists.in Zagreb. I fell in behind the group, listening to what was being said. The tourists were so pissed off by how prosperous Yugoslavia looked. They were furious. They kept saying, so this is what you get for leaving the bloc? Maybe we should leave. But the Soviet specialists were really invested in the Soviet Union staying as it was. Many of them were incredibly uncomfortable with Gorbachev. By contrast, the Eastern European specialists were licking their chops and saying. So there! So there! You are opening a Pandora’s box, Gorby. It was such a dramatic, uncertain, often fun time. I was not surprised that communism fell, or that the process would go very fast in Eastern Europe, spreading from one country to the next. What I did not expect was that the Soviet Union would break up into fifteen parts - though I expected that to happen in Yugoslavia. The first secessionist region there, by the way, was Serbia, not the usual northern suspects (Slovenia and Croatia). But I quickly realized that I had missed important aspects of the design of ethnofederal communist states. There was an internal empire as well as an external one. Regime deregulation in these contexts would lead to state deregulation.

Research during Communism

Q: It is well-known that communist regimes made life difficult for researchers. What techniques did you use to figure out what was going on? How important were fieldwork and visits compared to official data and other sources? What did you hope to find out during visits to the region?

Bunce: You needed to triangulate among all the sources of information you listed but add Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty. Newspapers were helpful (if you compared them, read in between the lines, and watched reporting on Soviet events in Eastern European newspapers), statistical compendia, papers published by “scientific” institutes.

Q: Newspapers from the region or…?

Bunce: Yes, from the region, including Eastern Europe. My reading Polish was uneven, but I could read in Serbo-Croatian, German, and Russian. But what was distinctive was that I used Eastern European sources to analyze the Soviet Union. I had a lot more access in Eastern Europe, and I knew Communists (as well as opposition leaders) there. I could talk to Communists. I also knew people who worked on communism there, and they shed a lot of light on the Soviet Union. It was also so much more pleasurable to do research there. Moscow was difficult. In Moscow you couldn't move around much. You had to have permission to do everything. In addition, sources were less generous with their information.

Q: So, you would end up in offices of bureaucrats, talking to them?

Bunce: Yes. I didn't have as much success in the Soviet Union as I had in Eastern Europe - especially Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia. I also spent a lot of time at various institutes and got hold of a lot of research papers.

Q: When you so that you were talking to members of the party, would you write to them and say, “Could I interview you?”

Bunce: Calling them usually invited their staff to put you off, so I did a lot of “showing up”. I talked to some of them - if I could wrangle a visit - or go with someone who was well-connected. Our discussions were more casual and more open-ended than interviews, but I took them as being interviews. I'm not sure they did. I had friends who were connected to the Party and friends who were in the opposition, and I spent, as I said, a lot of time at institutes. I am a big believer in talking to people on the ground. This is not widely recognized, but there was a lot of overlap among the opposition, ruling party officials, and members of institutes, especially in Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia. They were all kind of in it together, especially in Hungary, and especially in institutes dealing with economics. I built my arguments by using logic, material I read, people I talked to and ongoing research in and on these countries that addressed aspects of their political economy or, more generally, dictatorship. But I did a lot of guessing, filling in a lot of holes, making some leaps that were consistent with what I knew. It’s kind of embarrassing to see how much of research at that time involved guesswork. You could not get most of the material you wanted. You always had to think: does this make sense? If I were a leader in this context, what would I do, what could I do? I realized later, when I became more connected to the intelligence agencies in the U.S., that they were doing the same thing.

I was well-connected in Yugoslavia. Some of the old guys in the Communist party (partizans) were quite willing to talk a lot about the Soviet Union. They felt free to talk, and they had interacted with the Soviets during and after WWII. As an aside: you see a similar dynamic today. The Baltic States (and Finland) are among our best sources of information about Russia, because these states border Russia and have, for many years, trained a lot of great people to monitor Russian affairs. Was this an ideal way to gather data - no. Was I misled at least part of the time - yes. But research in those days was about pasting together bits and scraps of data drawn from a patchwork of sources that were not always reliable.

Q: Was there a distinction between scholars who spent a lot of time in the region and tried to do field work versus ones that sat at their desk and looked at the newspapers and the data.

Bunce: I was in between. I didn't do the amount of fieldwork a lot of people did, but I did a lot more library work than dedicated area scholars did. And I approached things in a more, “this would make sense, if this were true” kind of way. I've read probably as many newspapers and books and things like that as anyone did. But I didn't spend a lot of time in the field. I was not as tactile as many friends of mine who worked on Eastern Europe. They were there all the time. They were really committed to it. I chose, like many scholars, to work on the places that were relatively easy to get into and relatively easy to operate in; that is, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia. I always admired the hell out of Katherine Verdery, for example, for doing Romania. My God! The one time I was in Romania, I said, that's it. I’m never going back to that place again. I was not really an area scholar, but I was much more of one that scholars who spent all their time in their offices and in libraries.

What I learned from fieldwork, however, was that it was time that was never wasted. I could not say the same about library work.

Click here for Part 2.