Western scholars have long disagreed about the role that ideology played in the Cold War. The release of crucial documentation from the former East-bloc archives has shed new light on this question, but no consensus is likely to emerge. Even if all the archives are eventually opened, the new evidence will not—and cannot—provide full vindication for either realism or an ideology-based approach. A key task for scholars will be to reexamine the broad and often unspoken assumptions on which specific US and Soviet policies were based.

This article contends that the interaction between domestic circumstances in the USSR and the radical change in the international environment occasioned by the advent of the first Reagan administration played a substantial part in the early emergence of ‘New Political Thinking’ in the Soviet Union. That process had begun shortly after Brezhnev’s death. The Reagan factor loomed large in an internal Soviet debate over the direction of Soviet foreign policy. Four types of causal association are identified. While the Reagan administration was not the sole cause of the Soviet crisis that brought new thinking to the fore, it certainly contributed to a climate that strengthened the position of advocates of this perspective within the Soviet ruling elite.

This article argues that the end of the Cold War can be told as a story of the development of trust. Despite its centrality as a political concept, trust has only recently received focused attention in the field of international relations. Development of trust cannot be reduced to changing relationships of power or redefinitions of interests but requires communicative elements. The argument is demonstrated through a comparison of German–Soviet and Japanese–Soviet relations at the end of the Cold War. The key point is that trust and the lack of it, respectively, were a major factor in the profound transformation of the former relationship and led to stalemate in the latter.

Though usually assumed by scholars of international relations to have been one-of-a-kind, the Cold War—the global East-West rivalry that ended with the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union—resembled in many of its features an earlier match usually assumed by scholars of American history to have been entirely exceptional: the continental North-South rivalry that ended with the War Between the States. Each was a contest of ideologically ambitious, institutionally immiscible, and territorially extensionist socioeconomic systems. Each rivalry evolved a mechanism for the procrastination of conflict. In both cases this mechanism was initially deliberative—based on debate. It remained deliberative in the North-South case, which deteriorated from cooperation to catastrophe, but it switched from deliberative to confrontational—based on threat—in the East-West case, which ended in voluntary unilateral abandonment of ideology, institutions, and territory. The irony of the outcomes of these two rivalries, whose likelihoods of violent end would probably have been misranked at their respective midpoints, is discussed.

In spite of its initial rejection of the international system, the USSR became increasingly involved in diplomatic relations with the other—largely capitalist—powers. The intensity of diplomatic activity increased from the Khrushchev years, not only in relation to other states but also to international bodies and conventions. There was a comparable change, in the later wartime years and under Khrushchev, in the proportion of foreign states with which the USSR sustained relations; by the end of the Soviet period, in 1991, there were diplomatic relations with 85 per cent of the members of the international community. This evidence supports the thesis that outcast states will tend to become ‘socialised’ into a more cooperative relationship with their counterparts; it also suggests that the USSR had become a largely ‘normal’ participant in the international system before the end of communist rule.

This article examines Soviet foreign policy during the Second World War in the light of new evidence from the Russian archives. It highlights the theme of spheres of influence and the relationship between the pursuit of this goal by the USSR and the outbreak of the Cold War. It argues that the Cold War was the result of an attempt by Moscow to harmonise spheres of influence and postwar cooperation with Britain and the United States with the ideological project of a people’s democratic Europe.

The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, lasting from 1979 to 1989, was one of the major chapters in the Cold War. Analysis of how Soviet policy was made has, hitherto, focused on the decision to intervene, in December 1979. Equally important, however, as an episode in the final stages of the Cold War, and as an example of Soviet policy formulation, was the decision to withdraw. Basing itself on declassified Soviet documents, and on a range of interviews with former Soviet and Afghan officials, this article charts the protracted history of the Soviet decision and sets it in context: as with the decision to invade, the withdrawal reflected assessment of multiple dimensions of policymaking, not only the interests and calculation of Soviet leaders, but also relations within the Afghan communist leadership on the one hand, and strategic negotiation with the West on the other.

The breakdown of the Soviet Union surprised most scholars of international relations, comparative politics, and Soviet politics. Existing explanations attribute the breakdown of the Soviet Union to the reformist leadership of Gorbachev, and/or to systemic factors. These explanations do not focus on the key contribution of the war in Afghanistan. This is surprising since many scholars view wars as key causal factors in empire breakdown and regime change. We argue that the war in Afghanistan was a key factor, though not the only cause, in the breakdown of the Soviet Union. The war impacted Soviet politics in four reinforcing ways: (1) Perception effects: it changed the perceptions of leaders about the efficacy of using the military to hold the empire together and to intervene in foreign countries; (2) Military effects: it discredited the Red Army, created cleavage between the party and the military, and demonstrated that the Red Army was not invincible, which emboldened the non Russian republics to push for independence; (3) Legitimacy effects: it provided non-Russians with a common cause to demand independence since they viewed this war as a Russian war fought by non Russians against Afghans; and (4) Participation effects: it created new forms of political participation, started to transform the press/media before glasnost, initiated the first shots of glasnost, and created a significant mass of war veterans (Afghansti) who formed new civil organizations weakening the political hegemony of the communist party.

Discussion of what is ‘(post)-Soviet studies’ has become one of the most lively sub-fields of the discipline (if, indeed, it is a discipline), reflecting the mood of introspection and self-doubt that prevails in the area today. What precisely, is the subject in question? There is no consensus even over the name. The title of this short review was initially set as ‘post-Soviet studies’. Although from the outset aware of the shortcomings of the term, it was only as I began to think how to approach the subject that I realised that it was impossible—or at least profoundly misleading—to work under such a rubric. The concept of ‘Soviet’ grounds the emerging discipline too narrowly in the experience of a single country. The notion of ‘post-Sovietology’ is also emerging as a contender to describe the field, but that is doubly misleading, inheriting at best a mixed intellectual baggage and controversial legacy of the original subject of ‘Sovietology’, now compounded by the addition of the prefix ‘post’. The subject is indeed as much about the terms it uses and the methodologies it applies as it is about the events and processes it describes.

Alan Collins is to be congratulated for highlighting the role Gorbachev’s strategy of Graduated Reciprocation in Tension Reduction (GRIT) played in ending the military conflict between East and West. By offering an alternative view to the conservative opinion that America’s material strength forced the Soviets into submission, it suggests that statesmen caught in security dilemmas have real options and are not simply forced to compete for power. As a policy that fostered transparency which assisted the creation of security regimes, GRIT undoubtedly played a role in the way the military conflict ended. Yet the Cold War was not simply about the military balance. Collins’ account of this period is restricted by his bias towards state-centric and rationalist explanations of state behaviour. He underestimates the role ideology played in ending the Cold War and as such only offers half a Cold War story. The influence of the US during this period, as a cautious agent of liberal individualism, is completely ignored, yet, as this reply demonstrates, it is crucial to understanding the way the US reciprocated Soviet policies. Moreover, if ‘debate over what the Cold War was is part of the politics of deciding what the post-Cold War is’, the significance of this criticism is not merely academic. The implication of Collins’ unwritten assumption that state’s identities are egoistic is that a security community based on a common identity is impossible. The lesson that the Cold War, as opposed to the military conflict, only ended when a common identity based on liberal individualism was instituted, suggests that a transatlantic security community including Russia was and still is a possibility.

It is some time since I wrote GRIT, Gorbachev and the End of the Cold War and I am grateful to Jason Ralph for giving me an opportunity to re-examine the piece. It is always nice to be ‘congratulated’ and to be noted for providing ‘instructive’ analysis, even if, apparently, the article ‘suffers from epistemological flaws’ and ‘obstructs’ the future construction of security communities. The latter is particularly puzzling since the pursuit of GRIT-type strategies is an aid, not a hindrance, to the creation of security communities.