Editor's Introduction

Abstract

In the first, historic, article in this issue, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze's iconoclastic speech to his staff following the Nineteenth Party Conference in the summer of 1988 denounces the "primitively ideologized" direction of Soviet foreign policy in the six decades before the accession to power of General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The foreign minister concedes that the purges of the 1930s undermined Moscow's foreign policy abroad, that the Comintern's categorization of Social Democrats as "accomplices of fascism" paved the way for Hitler's ascent to power, that Soviet policies at least contributed to the erection of what he calls "the iron curtain," and that the Soviet military build-up of recent decades has threatened the USSR with economic exhaustion. Likewise, Shevardnadze notes that Khrushchev's statement that "we will bury you" ("my vas zakopaem") and of Brezhnev's theory that peaceful coexistence is only a form of class struggle would in other times have been labeled as "rightwing deviationism." Both formulations, the Soviet foreign minister tells us, undermined belief abroad that the Soviet people were peace-loving. He is also critical of his predecessor's walking out of the Geneva talks on limiting intermediate-range nuclear missiles, noting that the walk-out "facilitated" NATO deployment of the Pershing II and cruise missiles.