Soviet Foreign Policy at the Crossroads: Conflict and/or Collaboration?

The decision of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to occupy Czechoslovakia in August 1968, while it represents a fundamental turning point in Soviet foreign policy, most of whose implications are ambiguous yet ominous, should not be permitted to obscure the fact that the Soviet regime remains confronted with a wide array of postponed internal and external problems that demand action and yet defy resolution. The decision to arrest forcibly the processes of liberalization in Czechoslovakia stands out as an uncharacteristic act of will on the part of a regime whose four years in power have been marked by drift, indecisiveness, vacillation, paralysis, and “muddling through.” For five years the government of Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin has postponed action on painful problems, has permitted events and situations to accumulate dangerously, and in general has allowed itself to be dominated by events rather than domesticating them. During its first two years in office the regime's inaction was perhaps inaccurately ascribed to prudence, caution, and calculated restraint. It now appears in retrospect that paralysis was confused with prudence, inertia was mistaken for caution, and factional indecisiveness was accepted as self-restraint.