the arrangement of articles on the pages of the party newspaper Pravda and other indirect signs to try to understand what was happening in internal Soviet politics. To study the relations between Communist fraternal states, Kremlinologists compared the statements issued by the respective national Communist parties, looking for omissions and discrepancies in the ordering of objectives. The description of state visits in the Communist press were also scrutinized, as well as the degree of hospitality lent to dignitaries. Kremlinology also emphasized ritual, in that it noticed and ascribed meaning to the unusual absence of a policy statement on a certain anniversary or holiday. In the German language, such attempts acquired the somewhat derisive name "Kreml-Astrologie" (Kremlin Astrology), hinting at the fact that its results were often vague and inconclusive, if not outright wrong. After the Cold War The term Kremlinology is still in use in application to the study of decision-making processes in the politics of the Russian Federation. In popular culture, the term is sometimes used to mean any attempt to understand a secretive organization or process, such as plans for upcoming products or events, by interpreting indirect clues. While the Soviet Union no longer exists, other secretive states still do, such as North Korea, for which Kremlinology-like approaches are still used by the Western media. Such study is sometimes called "Pyongyangology", after the country's capital Pyongyang. Notable Kremlinologists and Sovietologists Alexander Zinoviev, the founder of Sovietology (Kremlinology) Anne Applebaum John Barron, author of The KGB Today Mark R. Beissinger Zbigniew Brzezinski Hélène Carrère d'Encausse Carey Cavanaugh Walter Clemens Stephen F. Cohen Robert Conquest Michael David-Fox R. W. Davies Evgeny Dobrenko J. Arch Getty Marshall Goldman Donald E. Graves Jonathan Haslam William G. Hyland George F. Kennan Khurshid Kasuri Michael Kort Wolfgang Leonhard Moshe Lewin William Mandel Jack F. Matlock Jr. Simon Sebag Montefiore Tom Nichols Mark Palmer Richard Pipes Condoleezza Rice Myron Rush Mark Saroyan Stephen Sestanovich Dimitri Simes Marshall D. Shulman Timothy D. Snyder Llewellyn Thompson, Robert F. Kennedy's Kremlinologist Robert C. Tucker, biographer of Joseph Stalin and former head of Princeton's Russian Studies program Adam Ulam, brother of Stanisław Ulam and head of the Russian Research Center at Harvard University Donald S. Zagoria See also Soviet Union–United States relations Russia–United States relations Team B Predictions of the collapse of the Soviet Union China watcher Kennan Institute Slavic studies Russian studies List of Russian legal historians List