ABSTRACT
With Gorbachev’s coming to power in 1985, the state’s position on the nature of international relations and capitalism changed along the lines staked out by mezhdunarodnik thinking on global problems and all-human solutions in the 1970s and especially in the early 1980s. Europe returned as a priority in the Soviet debate about the capitalist West as well as in foreign policy, with the state declaring 1987 ‘the year of Europe’. From 1987 to 1989, the state’s position on the EC and on the US presence in Western Europe took on a much more positive tinge. Yet again, the ground had been prepared by mezhdunarodnik writings.
