ABSTRACT
If the previous period was notable for the contraction of public political space, where the Russian debate about Europe was stripped of positions alternative to the state’s and public discussion of what that position should be was all but eradicated, then the period under discussion in this chapter saw a tentative expansion of public political space. The public debate about the state’s position was resuscitated in the form of professional debates between foreign affairs specialists, the mezhdunarodniki. These debates did not call into question the basic framework within which Europe was seen, and the debate about moral judgement was limited to a question of how much less advanced capitalist Europe was as compared to the socialist bloc. The focus was rather on how to interpret the relations between Western European states themselves, and also those between Western Europe on the one hand and the United States (and to some limited extent also Japan) on the other, as well as on what kind of relationship Russia should have with Western Europe. The tone was set by Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, where he announced that Soviet foreign policy was based on peaceful coexistence between states belonging to different social systems. This is, incidentally, an example of how a theme which is not new may invade the centre of the debate simply by being reiterated enough times and in a forceful enough fashion. For foreshadowings of the theme of peaceful coexistence during the first half of the 1950s, cf. Light (1988:216-17).
