ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the basic dynamics of change in the Soviet Union from the vantage point of early 1991 and assesses the implications of those dynamics for the study of Soviet foreign policy. Soviet foreign policy has gone through a number of significant phases of development, and each phase has left its imprint on the evolving debate about the nature of that policy. The most notable feature to outside analysts in this period was the ideological cast of Soviet foreign policy. The goal of the Soviet Union was to build a revolutionary order, and traditional European geopolitics was to take a back seat to the new class character of Soviet foreign policy. The Soviet Union was suffering a moral, cultural, and economic crisis. The main difference between Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev was that the latter promoted genuine political change in addition to dealing with the other crisis confronting the USSR.
