A Model for Study of Soviet Foreign Policy

Soviet foreign policy has been a subject of extensive and intensive study ever since the painful birth of the Soviet state. All the writings and investigations, except for the purely descriptive, are based in some degree on one or several key premises and assumptions of authors who used them to explain and interpret Soviet foreign policy. This is understandable and probably inevitable in view of the enormous significance of the subject matter, the vastness of observed behavior in time and in space, and the lack of available information on policy making. Consequently, scientific, intuitive, and even merely hopeful thinking has been applied to the evidences of Soviet foreign policy in an effort to find a method of analysis, a frame of reference, a tool of orientation which might permit some systematization of the whole subject.Clearly, a single seemingly well-constructed theory of Soviet foreign policy which purports to offer a key to broad analysis is too attractive for an analyst to ignore. But however plausible it may seem, it cannot possibly offer the whole answer. Some elements of Soviet foreign policy may be isolated, focalized, dissected, and examined, but others cannot be subject to even speculative, crude estimates.