ABSTRACT
A main source of the crisis was the need born of the Cold War to funnel huge resources into the maintenance and further development of the massive Soviet military machine and to go on with the Brezhnev-initiated war in Afghanistan and other foreign projects. Yet the Cold War continued with a new dynamic implicit in Khrushchev’s project of long-range competition with the West for influence in the Third World. In 1944–1953 Stalin fathered an “ideology of patriotism” and moved out in ways that thwarted the “oceanic geopolitical strategy” of the would-be world-dominant commercial-cosmopolitan elite, ergo the Cold War. Neo-hegemonism, Viktor Kuvaldin contends, would result in a new isolation for Russia and a second edition of the Cold War under far worse circumstances. In late 1994 and early 1995 the pendulum of Russian foreign policy shifted in a hardline nationalist and imperial direction.
