ABSTRACT

Soviet diplomacy adapted lessons of power politics from the imperial Russian experience to the new conditions in which the Soviet Union was born. A complex of motives resulted-making single-factor explanations futile-in which a traditional balance-of-power policy was combined with the desire for international guarantees of state interests. The Soviet Union worked outside the League of Nations to establish its own security system, an effort that was only partly successful. For Russia, the balance-of-power tradition had signified alliance with Germany; earlier in the Soviet period, it had animated Rapallo; and the year after Munich, the Hitler-Stalin pact was struck, which Hitler's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union annulled. Leading social scientists in the Soviet Union, including members of the Central Committee, have ceased to polemicize uncritically against "bourgeois futurology" and begun to explore Western notions of world order, with a view to applying these to the global management of international conflict.