ABSTRACT

Mikhail Gorbachev is nearing the end of his fourth year in office and the Soviet Union is in a state of creative turmoil. The society and the political system within which the experiment is taking place remain deeply Soviet in all of this term's negative Stalinist connotations. The combination of the trends of Soviet economic and technological stagnation with the explosive growth in the capitalist world was potentially, and in part actually, calamitous to the Soviet Union and to the domestic and international aspirations of its ruling circles. Soviet leaders expected major favorable political-international consequences from the American public recognition of a state of strategic parity with the Soviet Union. By the late 1970s and the early 1980s, however, the Soviet international position had deteriorated significantly. As Gorbachev and his associates argue, with justification, the most important Soviet foreign and security policy statement consists of the program of domestic renewal and radical reform.