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5 - Soviet foreign policy from détente to Gorbachev, 1975–1985

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

By
Vladislav Zubok
Edited by
Melvyn P. Leffler  and
Odd Arne Westad
Melvyn P. Leffler
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Odd Arne Westad
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Summary

Soviet international behavior in the decade before Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika is still an understudied and highly controversial topic. Some authors have long argued that the Soviet Union was greatly interested in détente in Europe, while neoconservative critics claimed that the USSR masterfully used détente in its quest for inexorable expansion and military superiority. At the time, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and most Soviet dissidents energetically supported the latter view.

Critics of détente made some excellent points. Soviet power reached its pinnacle in the late 1970s. Military expenditures, after rapid increases in the previous decades, stabilized at a high level. Three-fourths of all the research and development (R&D) potential of the country was located within the military-industrial complex. There were forty-seven “closed cities” with 1.5 million inhabitants, where military R&D labs and nuclear reactors were located, under the jurisdiction of the Atomic Ministry and the Ministry of Defense. The Politburo and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev himself rarely argued with the decisions and programs of the Military-Industrial Commission. In April 1976, after the death of Andrei Grechko, the former head of this commission, Dmitrii Ustinov, became the minister of defense. In 1976, the Soviet military began to deploy the Pioneer – which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) called the SS–20 – the new mobile, accurate, medium-range missile system carrying three warheads. Some experts had asserted that by the end of the 1970s the Soviet military would begin to surpass the United States in numbers of both missiles and nuclear warheads.

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The Cambridge History of the Cold War , pp. 89 - 111
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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