This study is concerned with political language. Specifically, it offers a structural comparison between conventional Soviet political rhetoric, exemplified by the discourse of K. U. Chernenko, and the novel form of political speech associated with his successor, M. S. Gorbachev. Inasmuch as the conclusions drawn from the analysis have important implications for the question of change in the Soviet system, it is perhaps a good idea at the outset to mark off the limits of what this analysis entails, how it approaches the question of change itself, and what aspects of the phenomenon it can address with some confidence.

The method employed here is that of semiotics. For the moment, it will suffice to distinguish its particular focus from that of other Western specialists who have analyzed the Gorbachev leadership and the prospects for change in the USSR. In so doing, it is possible to show how in either case the method frames the object of inquiry in such a way as to place in foreground or background one or another feature of the social world, and shapes thereby our perceptions and the conclusions which we draw from them. It might be said in this respect that whereas conventional studies of the Gorbachev leadership analyze its language from the perspective of the policy statements that it might contain, the approach adopted here amounts to an analysis of the language itself.

The articles selected for publication in this volume were chosen from among those presented at the Third World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies held in Washington, DC, from 30 October to 4 November 1985. The Congress, which was sponsored by the International Committee for Soviet and East European Studies and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, attracted over 3,000 scholars from forty-one countries. This figure represents a two-fold increase over the number of delegates who attended either the First Congress in Banff, Canada, in 1974 or the Second Congress in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1980 and reflects the revival of Slavic studies throughout the world.

More than 600 papers were formally presented or distributed at the Washington Congress. From among the substantial number submitted for possible publication in this series, the Editorial Committee has selected one hundred and sixty to appear in fifteen volumes. Five volumes are being published in the social sciences: three by Cambridge University Press and two by Lynne Rienner Publishers. Five volumes devoted to history and literature are being published by Slavica Publishers while the remaining five in education, law, library science, linguistics and Slovene studies are appearing as part of established series or as special issues of scholarly journals. The titles of all these publications will be found at the end of this volume.

Soviet policy toward the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America has undergone substantial expansion and change during the three decades since Khrushchev first initiated efforts to break out of the international isolation in which the USSR still found itself in the immediate post-Stalin years. Over the course of the past thirty years the Soviets have expanded significantly both the geographic range of their involvement with developing countries and the intensity of their political, military and economic activities. Moreover, they have increasingly acted in consort with “allies” such as Cuba and the countries of Eastern Europe. The studies included in the present volume examine various aspects of recent Soviet and East European policy toward the Third World.

The five chapters in Part I deal with broad aspects of Soviet policy. In the first chapter Roger Kanet examines the major trends in Soviet policy over the past thirty years. Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier is concerned especially with recent Soviet reassessments of both the nature of and prospects for revolutionary change in the developing countries, while Mark N. Katz discusses the problems faced by the Soviets in their support for “client” states currently confronted by internal insurgencies. In the two final chapters in Part I Paul Roth and Roger Kanet examine aspects of Soviet information and propaganda policy. While Roth notes the Soviet use of the concept of a New World Information Order to try to control Western news and information media, Kanet deals with the place of propaganda in Soviet policy in the Third World.

The contours of the various models for a New World Information Order (NWIO) or a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) became clear only in the course of the debate concerning the issues involved. The fundamental outline, however, had already been established before the term “New World Information Order” emerged in the mid-1970s. The existing or desired communication system of a given developing nation or political system is offered as a model for World Information Order, projected across the globe. Before we turn to a full discussion of the subject, some frequently ignored truisms concerning the role of communications in human affairs must be emphasized:

1. human social life depends on the exchange of information, on communication;

2. throughout history information has not only consisted of messages, but has also constituted a means of exerting influence;

3. no one can report about everything that happens or about everything on which information is available;

4. possessing information is a prerequisite for exerting influence, for power and information are intimately interrelated; and

5. the domestic information and communication policy of a country and its foreign information and communication policy depend on the given political and social system.

SOVIET MEDIA POLICY

If we wish to present the development of the Soviet concept of a NWIO, then we must investigate basic Soviet policy towards the mass media. Since 1917 it has been guided by the three functions Lenin defined for the press: those of collective propagandist, collective agitator, and collective organizer.

Indo-Soviet relations in the politico-security realm have flourished in part because of a lack of American willingness to help India. Significantly, the Nehru government had approached the United States in the 1950s and the 1960s to help build India's major steel projects in Bhilai and Bokaro. But Washington turned down India's requests because the projects were to be in the state sector of the economy. Again in late 1962, during India's débâcle in its border war with China, the Nehru government turned to the Kennedy Administration for assistance. While the latter responded promptly with small arms supply, Washington hesitated to comply with a subsequent Indian request for a longterm modernization of India's armed forces. The Pentagon feared that such US cooperation with the Indian armed forces would result in Pakistani retaliation in terms of closure of the US intelligence base in Peshawar targeted at the USSR. Paradoxically, Pakistan closed it down anyway a few years later. In all three cases (Bhilai, Bokaro and the Indian armed forces) Moscow was only too happy to fill the vacuum. All three today are, therefore, symbols of Indo-Soviet, rather than Indo-American friendship.

While Stalinist Russia looked upon newly independent India's nonalignment with as much suspicion as did US Secretary of State Dulles, following Stalin's demise in 1953 the Soviets were quicker to appreciate Third World nationalism and changed their Cold War perceptions and policy accordingly.

The interests of the East European countries in the Third World are usually much less discussed than those of the Soviet Union. It is assumed that East European relations with the developing countries are more or less aligned with Soviet policy, only with less important stakes. Very few specific studies have been devoted in the West to this topic. This is paralleled by a disproportion in the amount of literature published in the Soviet Union and in the East European countries. There is nothing comparable in the latter to the number of general and specialized Soviet institutes dealing with the Third World. To our knowledge only Hungary has a Center for Development Studies attached to the Institute for World Economics of the Academy of Sciences. In the other East European countries the institutions dealing with the developing countries are mostly interested in civilization, geography and language studies, and only marginally in economic problems.

This paper aims to present the main conclusions of a group research project on East–South relations. An earlier article from this project by Marie Lavigne has stressed the major differences between Soviet and Eastern European patterns of trade and cooperation in the Third World. Here we would like to elaborate on a particular aspect of this pattern – the gains in hard currency derived from those relations.

The expansion of trade between Eastern Europe and the Third World has, in general, been greater than the growth of the total trade of the six smaller CMEA members.

Since the mid-1950s the Soviet Union has intensified its efforts to develop ties with the non-communist countries of the Third World and has endeavored to assert its political influence in these parts of the world. Whereas Khrushchev's efforts were classed by the West under the rubric “commitment and adventurism,” Brezhnev's later policy has been praised as “highly rationalistic, realistic, pragmatic, and, until Angola, cautious.” The reference to Soviet–Cuban intervention in Angola (1975–76) is an expression of growing Western fear that the spectacular spread of Soviet power in the Third World could inflict damage on the economic interests of Western industrialized countries. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 not only heightened these fears, it triggered (primarily in the United States) an outright “perception revolution” with regard to the future goals of Soviet policy towards the Third World and the very nature of Soviet foreign policy in general.

Analysis of political and economic relations between the Soviet Union and the developing countries encounters fairly serious difficulties. There is no public Soviet discussion of goals and resource commitment; the same applies to gains and costs incurred by the Soviet Union through its relations with “the South.” Soviet public policy statements and press accounts are laden with ideology and propaganda; often they are hollow slogans that do not lend themselves well to analysis. Moreover, published Soviet economic statistics have only limited information value and are incomplete.

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) is a mixed organization. Apart from the USSR and Eastern Europe it includes three developing countries: Mongolia, Cuba and Vietnam. Mongolia was admitted in 1962 with few problems, probably because of its low population. Cuba entered in 1972 after a long delay, and Vietnam joined in 1978 in spite of opposition by at least one industrialized member, Czechoslovakia. Among those developing countries with the status of observers, Laos failed to gain admission once and Mozambique has been rejected twice.

This chapter will concentrate on only one very important aspect of foreign economic relations of the three developing members of CMEA, namely the foreign trade sector. The foreign trade of developing countries is generally characterized by an extreme dependence on one or a few partners and/or commodities; by a predominance of raw materials and intermediate goods in their exports, and of machinery and equipment, together with fuels and foodstuffs, in their imports; by a high degree of vulnerability to price fluctuations in the world market; and, lastly, by huge trade deficits. With these facts in mind, it is useful to try to determine whether joining the CMEA has meant the end of dependency relations for the three countries in question or rather the transformation of their old bonds into new, more sophisticated ones.

An increasingly sober and far-ranging review of the nature of Third World radicalism and its relationship to scientific socialism marks a significant change in Soviet perceptions about the USSR's ability to manipulate anti-imperialism to its advantage. Dating from about 1980, this re-examination is related to Moscow's difficulties in imposing a Marxist regime in Afghanistan, the unexpected turn of the Iranian revolution from an anti-American upheaval into Islamic fundamentalism, and the mounting concern for the performance of the Soviet economy.

Official statements give only partial and conflicting evidence of an altered outlook. In the past three years, for example, the May Day slogans, which reaffirm the regime's domestic and foreign policy objectives, have given up many ritualistic claims about revolutionary change in the Third World. They no longer single out the radical states that have chosen the path of socialist orientation; the adjective “invincible” has been dropped from the reference to the Soviet Union's alliance with the national liberation movements; and the “struggle against imperialism” is not mentioned as the goal of international solidarity. Yet, these claims have not disappeared altogether from other pronouncements.

To get a better sense of the on-going reassessment one must turn to the writings of Soviet experts on the Third World. Many of them are prominent in academic and Party institutions that help formulate foreign policy. Among these people the change of mood is unmistakable.

Since the end of the Second World War the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union has been the single most important factor influencing the nature of the international political system. Within a relatively short period of time after the conclusion of hostilities in Europe and Asia the two countries were engaged in a struggle for influence that focused, initially at least, on Europe. Within only a few years the Soviets managed to create a zone of satellite states in Europe which they dominated; moreover, in Asia, communist parties allied to the Soviet Union came to power in China, North Korea and North Vietnam.

Despite the significant increase in Soviet influence in the regions bordering Soviet territory and the growth of Soviet military power during the decade after the Second World War, when Stalin died in 1953 the Soviets were still in a position of substantial inferiority in comparison with the United States. The USSR was still a regional power whose major international competitor, the United States, commanded far superior resources and dominated the international system politically, militarily, and economically. Postwar Soviet expansion had played a crucial role in stimulating the creation of an American-centered system of alliances in Europe and Asia, all of which were oriented toward preventing the further extension of Soviet power and influence. As a result of the creation of this alliance system US military forces were stationed around virtually the entire periphery of the communist world, from Germany in the west, through the Middle East, and as far east as Korea and Japan.

The relationship between the Soviet Union and Syria in the Andropov era (November 1982–February 1984) provides a fascinating case study of the limits of a superpower's influence on a client state, particularly when that client becomes the only lever of influence a superpower has in a region deemed of great importance by the superpower's leadership. In order to analyze the Soviet–Syrian relationship, however, it is first necessary to deal with the goals of both the Soviet Union and Syria, and to determine to what degree the assistance each can offer the other is critical to the accomplishment of each country's goals.

As far as the question of Soviet goals in the Middle East is concerned, there are two major schools of thought. While both agree that the Soviet Union wants to be considered as a major factor in Middle Eastern affairs, if only because of the USSR's propinquity to the region, they differ on the ultimate Soviet goal in the Middle East. One school of thought sees Soviet Middle Eastern policy as primarily defensive in nature; that is, directed toward preventing the region from being used as a base for military attack or political subversion against the USSR. The other school of thought sees Soviet policy as primarily offensive in nature, aimed at the limitation and ultimate exclusion of Western influence from the region and its replacement by Soviet influence.