ABSTRACT
In his speech to the 27th Communist Party Congress in February 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear that the Third World was low in the new regime's list of priorities. Soviet policies in Third World arenas have always been conditioned by Moscow's relations with the West and by perceptions of the East-West balance of power. Soviet nuclear weapons development, especially as Moscow moved toward parity with the United States, helped secure Soviet territory against the West and Far East, while conventional weapons strength provided a strong defensive position in Central Europe. Soviet security-seeking—in terms of Moscow's history of establishing pro-Soviet communist governments in Eastern Europe and backing vanguard communist parties in Western Europe since World War II—also conditioned its security-seeking measures in Third World states. In his speech to the United Nations in December 1988, Gorbachev stated that the deideologization of interstate relations has become a requirement of the new phase.
