The conduct of relations with the Soviet Union has caused difficulty to successive British governments from the time of the October Revolution to the present day. The experience of Soviet diplomacy over two thirds of a century leaves us with the essentials of the problem unchanged but its significance sharpened by the rise of the Soviet Union to the status of a nuclear superpower. Is Chernenko's Soviet Union Lenin's state writ large, with its policies firmly rooted in the political philosophy of 1917? Does it really see the world order in terms of a struggle between socialism and capitalism, in which socialism will inevitably triumph and in which the task of Soviet foreign policy is to ensure that the transition is accomplished tidily and safely? Has the old imperial Russian drive been absorbed into the new philosophy to create a force, uniquely malign in character, whose relationship with the West is, by its own choice, one of hostility, modified only by expediency? Or is this major power now guided more by its practical interest than by its ideology and so beset with its internal and imperial problems that it has more to gain from stability than from conflict? Has it now become a power with which the West can create a relationship necessarily characterized by ideological confrontation, but, for all that, safe, stable and on occasion, mutually beneficial? To pose the problem in these terms is, of course, to oversimplify it at the outset. There is in reality no simple choice among all-embracing policy concepts. In the real world, policy is the product of a multitude of separate acts, unrelated to any philosophical concept, often uncoordinated and not infrequently conflicting. Yet, ultimately, in all their facets, the policies of Western governments towards the Soviet Union turn upon certain assessments, conscious or instinctive, about the nature and objectives of the Soviet state. It may, of course, be argued that there is nothing very remarkable about Soviet policy; that in its essence it is merely the policy which is to be expected from a continental imperial power, newly risen to superpower status and faced with the need to consolidate the areas under its control, to sap the strength of its opponents and to develop the means for worldwide projection of its power. This it is. But we need to look beneath the external manifestation of Soviet policies to the roots from which they spring. Through their history, their political structure, their economic resources, their geographical location, their beliefs, through a whole range of mutually interlinking factors, states develop the characteristics which make each of them unique as an international personality and unique in reaction to any given set of external circumstances at any given time. It is only too easy to judge international problems