ABSTRACT
Soviet President Mikhail S.Gorbachev has not only made major changes in the directions of his country’s foreign policy, but he has also fundamentally altered the ways in which it is thought of and talked about. Within the armoury of new concepts and slogans accompanying his major program for restructuring the Soviet system-including words such as perestroika and glasnost, which have already entered the lexicon of Western political discourse-none has more far reaching importance than the concept of new political thinking (NPT) (novoe politicheskoe myshlenie). Its significance and that of concepts associated with it, such as freedom of choice, are especially great in the area of foreign policy, to which they were originally dedicated, although their reverberations in the domestic political arena have also spread widely. The essence of the NPT is a fundamental reappraisal of traditional Soviet perceptions and ideological assumptions about the outside world and how to deal with it. At issue are the basic ideological and political rules of the EastWest conflict formulated first by Lenin and his Bolshevik Party stalwarts following their victory in the Great October Socialist Revolution. In fact, some of them antecede the seizure of power in 1917.
