[8] Matt Lenoe describes the "revisionist school" as representing those who "insisted that the old image of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state bent on world domination was oversimplified or just plain wrong.
[8][10] During the Cold War, lack of reliable information about the country forced Western analysts to "read between the lines" and to use the tiniest titbits, such as the removal of portraits, the rearranging of chairs, positions at the reviewing stand for parades in Red Square, 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.
A classic instance was Myron Rush, at the time an analyst for the RAND Corporation, making a key deduction from the choice of capital or small initial letters in the Soviet press in the phrase such as "First Secretary".
[12] 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.
[13] 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.