ABSTRACT
During World War II, many people in the West thought they saw signs that Soviet hostility toward the outside world was moderating and that the positive experience of the Grand Alliance would pave the way for a new era of cooperation between the Soviet Union and the capitalist world. Both groups of Western analysts, those writing during World War II and those coming twenty years later, generally ignored the official ideology. For them, the ideology was largely window dressing which had little to do with actual policy-making. Disarmament was portrayed as an important and feasible goal of Soviet foreign policy which could be realized even while capitalism was still a powerful force in the world. There was thus a striking congruence between ideology and policy during Nikita Khrushchev's reign. In both realms, he seemingly softened Stalin's legacy of confrontation and sought a less conflictual approach, but reforms were limited.
