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Recent writing on Soviet foreign policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Stephen White
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Extract

For a country of its size and population, the Soviet Union may often seem rather isolated from the affairs of other members of the world community. In part, at least, this reflects the influence of Soviet history and of the political tradition that has derived from it. With its broad and relatively open frontiers, Russia is a country that has been invaded and occupied many times by outside powers. Foreigners, since the earliest times, have been required to live in special residential areas and have been regarded popularly as well as by officials with a good deal of suspicion and hostility. Strong currents of Slavophilism, particularly from the 19th century, influenced public as well as governmental opinion and helped to create an attitude towards the West which combined an admiration for its prosperity and efficiency wth a deep repugnance towards its individualistic chaos and petty-minded commercialism. In the Soviet period, attitudes of this kind were strengthened by communist ideology, which saw the USSR as the leading force in a global struggle for socialism, and by the attempts of outside powers, immediately after the Revolution and during the Second World War, to overthrow the Soviet government and install a more compliant regime in Moscow. In economic terms, similarly, the Soviet period saw the strengthening of tendencies towards economic autarchy which had their origins in the pre-revolutionary period. Even today foreign trade, with socialist as well as capitalist countries, accounts for a relatively small proportion of Soviet national income, the Soviet currency is not freely convertible, and the movement of people or information across Soviet frontiers is closely regulated and very limited.

Type
Review articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , April 1986 , pp. 127 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1986

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References

1. Calculated from the data in Narodnoe khozyaistvo SSSR v 1983 g. (Moscow: Finansy i statistika, 1984), pp. 560, 36, 47.

2. Calculated from Gromyko, A. A. and Ponomarev, B. N., eds., Istoriya vneshneipolitiki SSSR 1917–1980, 2 vols. (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), vol. II, pp. 707–717Google Scholar (the present total includes a small number of states, such as Israel, with which diplomatic relations are no longer maintained).

3. White, Stephen, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (London: 1979), pp. 182–183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. The first report appeared in Pravda, 11 December 1982, p. 1; subsequent reports have been issued in the same manner, normally at weekly intervals. All such reports indicate that additional unspecified matters have been discussed.

5. Ulam, Adam B., Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–73, 2nd ed. (New York: 1974).Google Scholar

6. Nye, Joseph S., ed., The Making of America's Soviet Policy (New Haven and London: 1984).Google Scholar

7. See Haslam, Jonathan, The Impact of the Depression (London: 1983)Google Scholar and The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe (London: 1984)Google Scholar; two further volumes are in preparation. The present author's Origins of Detente: The Genoa Conference and Soviet-Western Relations, 1921—22 (Cambridge: 1986) might also be mentioned.

8. Gromyko, A. A.et al., eds., Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR, 21 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1957-1977).Google Scholar

9. Sovetskii Soyuz na mezhdunarodnykh konferentsiyakh perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny 1941—1945gg., 6 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1978–79; reprinted in 1984).

10. Ministerstvo inostrannykh del SSSR, Za mir i bezopasnost' narodov. Dokumenty vneshnei politiki SSSR 1966 god, 2 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1983). Volumes for 1967 and subsequent years have been appearing at approximately annual intervals.

11. Marcou, Lilly, Le Kominform (Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977)Google Scholar, L'lnter-nationale apres Staline (Paris: 1979) and Le mouvement communiste depuis 1945 (Paris: 1980).

12. Helene Carrere d'Encausse, Le grand frere (Paris: 1983; new ed., 1985).Google Scholar

13. See Malcolm, Neil, Soviet Political Scientists and American Politics (London: 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hough, Jerry F., The Struggle for the Third World: Soviet Debates andAmerican Options (Washington: 1986).Google Scholar

14. See Shenfield, Stephen, ‘Trends in Soviet Thinking’, in (Holden, Gerard, ed.), The Second Superpower. The Arms Race and the Soviet Union (London: 1985), pp. 53–59Google Scholar, and ‘The relation between the values of peace and socialism in contemporary Soviet ideology’, Paper presented to the UK Political Studies Association Conference, Manchester, 1985. The recently-established journal Detente (Leeds, quarterly, since 1984) provides a good survey of trends in Soviet thinking on such matters.