ABSTRACT
Amerikanistika, the perspectives of foreign policy institutions like the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Central Committee International Department, and the KGB, and the Soviet leadership have been analyzed. At the outset, one must concede that attempting to evaluate Soviet attitudes on Congress’ role in US foreign policy and relating those attitudinal evaluations to the validity of existing Western perspectives of Soviet foreign policy is a highly difficult task. The most notable difficulty is the inescapable problem of levels of analysis within which attitudes are filtered. Several levels of analysis in some way shape attitudes: the level of decisionmaking; the level of bureaucracy; the nature and state of domestic politics; the international environment and; the level of personal beliefs and images. Evidence which seems to provide support for one of the competing Western perspectives of Soviet foreign policy may in fact have been filtered through one or more of these levels of analysis.
