To legions of people estranged from Western life, the USSR was a harbinger of a brilliant future. Class justice, racial harmony, democratic decency, and modernization unencumbered by rapacious capitalism and liberal cant would reign. Despite inklings that not all was well, Anna Louise Strong devoted her intellect and energy to the USSR for two decades. To Strong, the performance of the proletarian republic in WWII vindicated Stalin’s leadership, which had already steered the country through collectivization, industrialization, a purge of traitors, and diplomatic competitions between cunning imperialist powers. Once prominent in dissenting circles-alternately celebrated or reviled in the public at large – she is now little remembered. Strong is, though, worthy of scholarly interest as her career and life sit at the intersection of transnational activism and WWII and Cold War history. For the better part of two decades, Strong lived in the USSR, whence she interpreted for her compatriots its promise and progress: “To promote [mutual] understanding became my life’s work.” Her purpose assumed added urgency when in 1941 war engulfed the Soviet Union.

This chapter confronts the primary obstacle to determining the frequency of stasis: the silence of our sources concerning the occurrence of stasis in almost all the roughly 200,000 polis-years that constitute Greek history 500–301. First, it uses the proxies for prominence introduced in Chapter 4, together with the results obtained in Chapter 5 and a set of case studies, to show that our sources rarely provide any positive evidence for stability (i.e., the absence of stasis); and that their silence is, consequently, our only source of evidence for stability in most polis-years. Second, it shows that, contrary to prevailing assumptions in existing scholarship, silence has no explanatory value vis-à-vis stability in most polis-years. In other words, the fact that no extant source indicates the occurrence of stasis in a given polis-year very rarely militates against the possibility that stas(e)is occurred. Finally, it concludes that the extant sources provide us with evidence for stability in only a few, exceptional cases. Consequently, we have to recognize that unattested staseis could potentially have occurred in almost any of the 200,000 polis-years under consideration.

This chapter uses qualitative analysis to elucidate the quantitative results obtained in Chapter 10. First, it explains why most staseis began with relatively minor forms of violence, such as shows of force, assassinations, and expulsions. Next, it addresses the follow-on question of why so many staseis ended before escalating to involve more intense forms of violence, such as battles and mass executions. Finally, it discusses the implications of the results obtained in Chapter 10 from a qualitative perspective.