ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the evidence of recent personnel appointments and institutional changes within the Soviet foreign-policy establishment. The political weight of ideological tendencies is assessed as of March 1987. However, while the interdependence perspective has now acquired a political status roughly on the level of other influential perspectives, it is as yet far from constituting a new orthodoxy. The foreign-affairs institutes of the Academy of Sciences may on the whole be regarded as institutional strongholds of the interdependence perspective. The appointment of Anatoly Dobrynin, Ambassador to the USA since 1962, to head the International Department in March 1986 marks a significant change in the role of this department of the Central Committee. The political status of the new approach has risen since Gorbachev’s accession to power from that of a tolerated, largely implicit tendency on the fringes of the political establishment to that of a prominent, explicit orientation enjoying top-level support - most notably from Dobrynin, less directly from Gorbachev.
