Ideology in the Soviet View of International Affairs

Abstract

Many Western specialists on Soviet affairs are likely to react to any discussion of the role of Soviet ideology in foreign policy with a sense of déjà vu and boredom and the comment that there is nothing more to say about a problem that has been discussed ad infinitum and ‘solved’. Ideology, they say, may have explained something of Soviet foreign policy in the early period (that is, before Stalin came to power) but there has been a long evolutionary process, as a result of which ‘national’ or ‘state’ interests of the USSR have superseded the ideological dimension of Soviet politics. Brest-Litovsk, the proclamation of the New Economic Policy (nep), entry into the League of Nations, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the 20th Party Congress and the Sino-Soviet split are taken as landmarks supposedly demonstrating the increasingly marked contradiction between ‘national’ or ‘state’ interests and ideology.