Soviet Diplomacy Research Articles

The great test: Soviet diplomacy and the Gulf War

(1992). The great test: Soviet diplomacy and the Gulf War. Diplomacy & Statecraft: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 272-302.

Military Occupation and Diplomacy: Soviet Troops in Romania, 1944-1958

In 1958, after fourteen years of military occupation, Khrushchev-in an unprecedented act-withdrew the Soviet Union's troops from Romania as part of a political move intended to encourage the withdrawal of Western military forces from Europe. In analyzing this crucial historic episode, Sergiu Verona's comprehensive study illustrates the dynamics of Soviet military presence in Romania and provides a framework for understanding Soviet security policy, then and now, as well as the interaction between Soviet military objectives and diplomacy. Drawing on declassified archival material in the United States and the United Kingdom, the author considers Khrushchev's reversal of Stalinist expansionism by examining the motivation, function, and operation of the initial occupation of Romania; the complex involvement of Soviet diplomacy and its perception by the United States and other Western powers; the process by which Khrushchev decided to withdraw Soviet troops from that country; and the impact of this decision on Soviet policy. Verona extends his analysis, providing comparisons between Khrushchev's and Gorbachev's approaches to Eastern Europe, noting that similarities exist not only in domestic policies but in the realm of foreign policy as well.

Soviet Perspectives on Asian Security

The accelerating pace of Sino-Soviet normalization, Soviet-South Korean mutual recognition, enhanced prospects for resolving the Cambodian conflict, and the intensified, if still inconclusive Soviet dialogue with Japan all testify to the vigor of Soviet diplomacy in Asia. Moreover, all of them clearly represent the fruition of major elements of Gorbachev's Asian policy framework laid out in his Vladivostok and Krasnoyarsk speeches. As a result of these events and the trends they symbolize we can begin to make conclusions concerning the nature or even existence of a Soviet Asian strategy. Indeed, the outlines of a strategy are clear and point to a new policy and tactics for Asia whose ultimate target is Japan-more precisely the U.S.Japanese security system-and whose key objective was to improve relations with China. In other words, the strategy targeted on Japan and the United States has not changed but the policy and tactics differ fundamentally. This distinction becomes clear if one considers that, from the Soviet standpoint, strategy, policy, and tactics are all discrete, if overlapping phenomena.1 At the same time the tactics, particularly in the military domain, for example, the issues of the Kurile Islands and the opening up of Vladivostok and the Maritime Provinces as foreign economic zones, are the subject of an intense debate in the USSR between the services and the reformers, a debate which also overlaps the intense military-civilian debate inside the USSR on all security issues.

Les avatars du « grand dessein » Russe

The successive embodiments of the Russian ' grand design ', Taline Ter Minassian. A Messianic theme developed over several centuries, the Mediterranean question in its classic form of the problem of the access to the Straits has been a constant first of Russian, then of Soviet foreign policy. But in the present state of the URSS's economic and national decomposition, Soviet diplomacy is no longer able to carry out a power policy, one aspect of which has been the search for the Mediterranean locks since at least the 19th century. In a more modest perspective, it is now applied outside of the Mediterranean area, even it still aspires to dispose of some influence in the hypothesis of a general settlement of the Near East problems.

The Soviet Union and Northern Europe: New Thinking and Old Security Constraints

This article argues that the interdependence and traditional stability of Northern Europe make it an excellent arena for the Soviet foreign policy of New Thinking. For most of the postwar period, the situation in the Nordic region, according to the Soviet perspective, has been satisfactory if not ideal. In the 1980s, the U.S. naval response to the Soviet strategic buildup on the Kola Peninsula brought increasing instability to the region, a major challenge to Soviet foreign policy. New Thinking attempts to manage current problems through a comprehensive set of security, economic, and environmental initiatives. The article concludes that New Thinking was probably oversold, as Soviet foreign policy has had little success with the intractable security issues in the region. Soviet diplomacy in Northern Europe presents insights into Gorbachev's policy of a common European home, however.

Soviet military policy: an International security reader

Soviet military policy has been one of the most important and perplexing issues confronting the United States since 1945. Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign policy innovations have focused renewed attention on these vital questions. In this timely reader, ten experts on the Soviet Union offer their perspectives on Soviet military strategy and defense policy, covering the foreign policy context, nuclear weapons, conventional forces, and force and Soviet diplomacy. Contributors: Jack Snyder, Franklyn Griffiths, ,Stephen M. Meyer, Raymond L. Garthoff, Fritz W. Ermarth, Dimitri K. Simes, Donald MacKenzie, Matthew A Evangelista, and Richard Ned Lebow.Sean M. Lynn-Jones is the managing editor of International Security, where Steven E. Miller is also an editor. Stephen Van Evera is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.

Last Chance in Manchuria: The Diary of Chang Kia-ngau. Edited by Donald G. Gillin and Ramon H. Myers. Translated by Dolores Zen, with the assistance of Donald G. Gillin. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1989. viii, 350 pp. $36.95.

This diary offers an important new perspective on the critical events leading to the end of the Chinese civil war. From September 1945 to April 1946, Chang Kia-ngau kept a daily log in the negotiations between Nationalist China and Soviet Union to recover Manchuria from Soviet military occupation. The diary reveals that the Russians actively sought Nationalist China's cooperation in rehabilitating and operating the huge industrial complex that the Japanese had built in Manchuria during the 1930s and 1940s. The Russians were willing to let Chiang Kai-shek's government take control over Manchuria if the Nationalists would pledge that only Russia would be able to exert foreign influence in Manchuria. Chang Kia-ngau's diary is an eyewitness account of how Manchuria, one of the world's greatest industrial sites, fell to the control of the Chinese Red Army and thus led to the communist victory over Chiang Kai-shek. This book will interest students of cold war rivalry, U.S. foreign policy, Soviet diplomacy, and Chinese history alike.

Ireneusz Iredyński' s Drama of Exposure

Ireneusz Iredyński made his literary debut with a short poem published in 1955, less than three years after Stalin's death , 'and on the eve of the 1956 reorganization of communist governments officially marking the end of Stalinism. It was 1956, of course, that witnessed the schizophrenia of Soviet diplomacy: a mere eight months separated Krushchev's "secret speech" condemning Stalin's crimes and the brutal quelling of the Hungarian revolution. Iredyński, born in Poland in 1939, came of age in this environment and his writing was born of its contradictions. Joining in the gradual flow of deStalinization that followed the election of Gomulka as Poland's premier in 1956, he began writing dramas of exposure that critique duplicity , chicanery, and the manipulations of those in power. Yet he remained sensitive to the fragility of all stability in Poland, and wrote from a remove of healthy skepticism. His plays express a profound mistrust, not only of the sincerity of those in power, but also of the purity and resilience of those in opposition.

The Soviet Union and Southeast Asia: A New Beginning?

Soviet Third World policy under Gorbachev has downgraded the importance of ideology and military force in favour of greater pragmatism and diplomatic activism. An example of this shift is the recent Soviet policy towards Southeast Asia, which has been marked by frequent diplomatic visits, drive for better trade links, support for a Southeast Asian Nuclear Free Zone and efforts to improve ties with Indonesia. But its alliance with Vietnam remains a formidable barrier to any significant improvement in Soviet relations with ASEAN. Soviet leverage over Vietnam on the Kampuchean crisis, the principal source of contention between ASEAN and Vietnam, is limited and Moscow is unlikely to try to please ASEAN by insisting on a Vietnamese withdrawal for fear of losing its bases in Indochina. Thus, the new-style Soviet diplomacy does not hold out any better prospects for improving Soviet political standing in the region than the failed policy of the Brezhnev era.

Stalin, the Politburo, and the Onset of the Cold War, 1945-1946

The precise function that Marxist-Leninist ideology serves in the formation and conduct of Soviet foreign policy remains a highly contentious question among Western scholars. In the first postwar year, however, few senior officials or Soviet specialists in the West doubted that Communist ideology served as the constitutive element of Soviet foreign policy. Indeed, the militant revival of Marxism-Leninism after the Kremlin had downplayed it during 'The Great Patriotic War" proved to be an important factor in the complex of causes that led to the breakup of the Grand Alliance. Moscow's revival of that ideology in 1945 prompted numerous top-level Western leaders and observers to regard it as heralding a new wave of Soviet world-revolutionary messianism and expansionism. Many American and British officials were even alarmed by the claim, renewed, for example, in Moscow's official History of Diplomacy, that Soviet diplomacy possessed a "scientific theory," a "weapon" possessed by none of its rivals or opponents. This "weapon," Marxism-Leninism, Moscow ominously boasted, enabled Soviet leaders to comprehend, foresee, and master the course of international affairs, smoothing the way for Soviet diplomacy to make exceptional gains since 1917. Now, in the postwar period, Stalinist diplomacy opened before the Soviet Union "boundlesshorizons and the most majestic prospects."

Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 239 is not currently economically feasible, in the future seabed deposits may prove to be a significant source of some of the minerals discussed. On the whole, however, Maull provides a sound analysis of resources and Western security and gives worthwhile suggestions for managing the risks involved. Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair. By Michael Beschloss. New York: Harper and Row, 1986. 401 pp. $19.95/cloth. Reviewed by ChristopherJ. Littel, M.A. candidate, SAIS. In the preface to Mayday Michael Beschloss states that the U-2 incident "deserves renewed attention because of the light it sheds on U.S. -Soviet diplomacy and other battles being fought in our own day." Given the roller coaster path of superpower relations over the past three years, Beschloss's book could not have come at a better time. Mayday is an insightful and analytical attempt to place the U-2 incident of 1 May 1960 in a clearer historical perspective; his reconstruction of the history of the U-2 program clearly identifies the underlying assumptions of the postwar U.S. strategy toward the Soviet Union. Beschloss has two basic premises: first, the intelligence community— particularly CIA director Allen Dulles— was determined to prevent another strategic surprise attack like the bombing of Pearl Harbor and sought to use the surveillance capabilities of the U-2 as part of this defensive strategy; and second, despite president Eisenhower's tightfisted management of the program, bureaucratic politics and inadequate supervision were partly responsible for the president's actions in April 1960, when Ike became "a bit careless with success ." Beschloss further argues that none of Eisenhower's top aides shared either his priorities or his optimism that détente "would or should be established." On the Soviet side, the author portrays Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev as an outspoken, volatile, and inconsistent leader who usually angered his own party members more than his U.S. counterparts. Beschloss does maintain, with some credulity, that Khrushchev was also a "leader with an extraordinary sense of vulnerability" who genuinely sought better relations with the United States. On balance, the author's analysis is thoughtful and detailed. He argues that "involving the public can strengthen the conduct of foreign policy," a popular notion, but not one supported by the circumstances of the U-2 incident . Beschloss is, moreover, a master of integrating the factual and the dramatic, portraying the spy plane's pilot, Gary Powers, as a pawn in a larger game of global chess. The real story of the U-2 affair, not lost on the author, is how governments respond in crisis situations. Although Beschloss criticizes Eisenhower's improvisatory approach to damage control, perhaps it was and still is the most appropriate model for crisis management. As Beschloss indicates in his conclusion , uncertainty often fuels speculation. It is perhaps less important how Power's aircraft was downed than the impact the event had on the actors involved. In Beschloss's words, "The U-2 was a flaming javelin unwittingly thrown into the dry forest of suspicions and 240 SAIS REVIEW misperceptions that surrounded American-Soviet affairs of the period." Beschloss has made an important contribution to the conduct of U.S. foreign policy with a thorough discussion of all parties involved in this exercise in diplomatic sensitivity. ...

The USSR and Asia in 1986: Gorbachev's New Initiatives

The succession of Mikhail Gorbachev to the leadership of the Soviet Union has prompted significant new initiatives in Soviet foreign policy, with Asia a particular focus of this activism. Virtually every state in the Asian-Pacific region-from China to Kiribati-has been the object of Soviet overtures for improved relations. These overtures reflect not only new attention and a fresh approach to developments in Asia; they are also part of a concerted and ambitious effort to overcome Moscow's political isolation and economic marginality in this vital and dynamic region, to regain the diplomatic initiative, and to win breathing space for domestic revitalization. Gorbachev's foreign policy strategy is a direct outgrowth of his domestic priorities. Indeed, the two are more closely entwined at this juncture than at any previous time in postwar Soviet history. Economic reform is not only the key to domestic revitalization, in Gorbachev's view; it is essential to sustain the Soviet Union's international role. As Gorbachev himself described this linkage, the success of efforts at internal reform will determine whether or not the Soviet Union will enter the twenty-first century in a manner worthy of a great power. To gain the time necessary to consolidate his power and to carry out his program of economic modernization, Gorbachev urgently needs a respite from external pressures. The key challenge he confronts is to win the time and political support needed to carry out the necessary retrenchment without jeopardizing the major strategic and political gains of the 1970s-and his own position with them. With this objective in mind, he has sought to revive the atrophied instruments of Soviet diplomacy to convey an image of moderation and goodneighborliness, and of a willingness to seek political settlements to out-

The USSR in Third World Conflicts: Soviet Arms and Diplomacy in Local War, 1945-1980

The USSR in Third World Conflicts: Soviet Arms and Diplomacy in Local War, 1945-1980

The USSR in Third World Conflicts: Soviet Arms and Diplomacy in Local Wars, 1945-1980

The USSR in Third World Conflicts: Soviet Arms and Diplomacy in Local Wars, 1945-1980

Traders, Crusaders, and Cruise Missiles: Soviet Foreign Policy toward the Low Countries

In Soviet foreign policy, the Low Countries—Belgium and the Netherlands—seem to occupy a position symbolized by their name. Yet, in the past decade, Soviet diplomacy has scored a number of successes: by 1985 the cohesion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization seemed threatened by the recurrent non-decision-making of Belgian and Dutch governments on the issue of intermediate-range nuclear forces; in Belgium the Soviets have succeeded in establishing a valuable Soviet-controlled infrastructure; and the Dutch position on the European gas market is undercut by Siberian gas. These benefits have been reached at minimal cost to the USSR. This discrepancy calls for an explanation that goes beyond simple formulas and delves into Dutch and Belgian political cultures, in which neutralism and Atlanticism are constant but uneasy bedfellows.

Moscow and Tokyo: An Uneasy Peace

This article examines why Soviet-Japanese relations since 1945 have been so poor at the political, economic, and military levels. It first analyzes recent changes in Moscow's foreign policy toward Japan and then looks at the major determinants shaping this policy. Kimura assesses recent Soviet policy and concludes that the Soviet Union has few diplomatic options open to improve the Soviet-Japanese relationship. Soviet diplomacy in the past has been heavy-handed, clumsy, and inflexible, especially as regards the so-called Northern Territories. Soviet attitudes must evidence greater flexibility and a willingness to negotiate before the relationship can be significantly improved.

Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (review)

294 SAIS REVIEW II, which concludes with a chapter on European financial integration, but it, too, is useful reading for students of banking and finance. Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relationsfrom Nixon to Reagan. By Raymond Garthoff. Washington, D.C: The Brookings Institution, 1985. Reviewed by Jonathan Haslam, Associate Professor of Soviet Studies, SAIS. It is difficult to conceive of a subject as controversial yet as important as the history of relations betwen the United States and the Soviet Union from Nixon to Reagan. The preponderant weight of orthodox analysis here in the United States tells us that détente was shipwrecked on the Angolan coastline as contingents of Cubans arrived in Soviet transports, or that it was "buried in the sands of the Ogaden." The purveyors of this orthodoxy hold the Russians responsible. If it was not Angola or the Horn of Africa, it was the decision to deploy the SS-20. The "I-was-there" brigade customarily casts condescending glances if not verbal abuse at those so foolish to question such sacred truths. Dr. Raymond Garthoff—refugee from government, iconoclast, and dissentient—is an exception. GarthofFs volume, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, is enormous: more than one thousand pages, for the most part densely packed (yet only the Afghan chapter exhausts one's concentration) and heavily footnoted from both published and unpublished Soviet and American sources. Unlike his rivals on the anti-Soviet Right, who ape Soviet practice by using their writing as a continuation of the Cold War by other means, Garthoff insists on the importance of scholarship in the study of the most recent past. Not that he is neutral, however. On the contrary, for all his even-handedness, Garthoff takes a firm position on the liberal wing of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, emphasizing the reactive nature of Soviet foreign policy, stressing perceptions above interests, and harmony over conflict. He is also partisan with respect to the dramatis personae: His loathing for Kissinger is evident throughout the text. Yet he is always meticulously careful in matching his interpretation of events to the available evidence, and the evidence he has unearthed is impressive. Garthoff retraces the steps of American and Soviet diplomacy from 1969. What he demonstrates is that under Nixon and Kissinger, the public rhetoric about détente existed not only in Washington but also in Moscow, that Brezhnev had to fight a battle at home in order to establish relations with the United States on a new basis, and that the pursuit of old-fashioned geopolitics by the Nixon administration continued unimpaired by grand declarations of principle. The U.S. government seized every opportunity to oust Soviet influence (the Middle East was the best example) and Brezhnev was in no position to behave otherwise when similar opportunities arose to weaken American influence (as in the Horn of Africa). Garthoff is at his best when dealing with the day-to-day flux of U.S.-Soviet relations. He is unbeatable at unweaving the tangled web of arms control issues. But he is somewhat at sea with ideology, as one might expect from a practitioner suspicious of political rhetoric. GarthofFs own experience gives these pages an extraordinary solidity and completeness. He has made exhaustive use of Soviet and American sources. Even members of the Soviet Communist Party Central BOOK REVIEWS 295 Committee have been interviewed and Garthoff has had either direct or indirect access to classified material on the American side of the relationship. However, for all the insights Garthoffs personal experience has afforded, it has also produced its own limitations. His attitude toward ideology is captured in the following assertion: "While ideological conditioning and belief do influence policy, they do not determine it." Politics is unfortunately not so simple. Consider, for instance, the "Failure to Define a Code of Conduct" between Moscow and Washington. Why were the powers unable to define a mutually acceptable and practicable code of behavior? The United States, Garthoff tells us, refused to "concede political parity." But this begs the question, why? Was it not because the ideological differences between the two powers ran too deep and ultimately determined policy? Garthoff consistently underrates...

The USSR in Third World conflicts: Soviet arms and diplomacy in local wars 1945–1980

The USSR in Third World conflicts: Soviet arms and diplomacy in local wars 1945–1980

Deux ou trois choses à propos du nouveau maître de la diplomatie soviétique

A Look at the New Master of Soviet Diplomacy, by S. Kartveli The choice of Eduard Shevardnadze to replace Andrei Gromyko cornes as a surprise. Nothing would seem to have predisposed this provincial apparatchik to diplomacy. However, his choice is perhaps well-considered and rational. A reformist, he was already practicing Gorbachevism in his previous functions before the advent of Gorbachev. He is a confidant of Gorbachev and a man of proven talents as a negotiator and political manipulator. In a world where image and appearance are often of paramount importance, the choice of Shevardnadze is also sound. He personifies the new breed of young, strong, reformist administrator, who is also less Russian and more authentically multinational. In the Russian subconscious, the prototype of a Georgian is a mixture of seducer, hunter, brave and vengeful fighter, and stubborn highlander with the soûl of an actor. Gorbachev undoubtedly took ail these factors into account in making his choice.

The U.S.S.R. in Third World Conflicts: Soviet Arms and Diplomacy in Local Wars, 1945-1980

The U.S.S.R. in Third World Conflicts: Soviet Arms and Diplomacy in Local Wars, 1945-1980