ABSTRACT
This chapter makes a balance sheet of the past, to locate those traditional theoretical issues that remain central today, and to identify more clearly what are the main challenges of the future. Yet, looking back on the mainstream writing on Soviet foreign policy, one might argue that the spirit of the field as a whole remained rather conservative and isolated from the general developments of International Relations and other social sciences. The special features of the Soviet system characterised the Traditionalism vs. Scientism dispute in Soviet foreign policy studies, perhaps explaining partially why the field of Soviet foreign policy study had still remained overwhelmingly traditional in spirit in the turn of the 1970s. Scientism however gradually expanded in the 1970s and the two competing approaches, Traditionalism and Scientism, coexisted uneasily in the study of Soviet foreign policy. From the early 1960s onwards the totalitarian model was most criticised, however, for misinterpreting the whole picture of the Soviet political system.
