Kremlinologists Reading Red Square Lineups

During the Cold War, Western analysts called Kremlinologists faced a Soviet government that revealed almost nothing about who held real power in Moscow. With so little official information, they closely watched Red Square parades and other public events, studying which leaders appeared, which did not, and where each man stood in the lineup. They timed the gaps between officials, noted who stood closer to the top leader, and tracked who moved farther away over time. By dissecting these small visual cues, Kremlinologists tried to determine who was rising, who was fading, and how the balance of power inside the Kremlin shifted from year to year.

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