ABSTRACT
Official histories of Soviet foreign policy aver that throughout its history the party has steered the correct middle course. Emerging in the nineteenth century, movements for revolution in Russia produced political values, beliefs, and symbols that formed part of the political landscape in which the foreign policy of the late tsarist period was devised. During the three decades from the Bolshevik Revolution to the beginning of the Cold War, the Soviet regime functioned in an international system that, in certain fundamental respects, more closely resembled the one faced by the tsars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than the one that emerged after Second World War. Just as the tsarist foreign policy tradition is one source of the perceptions and behavior of foreign policy decision makers during the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, so also the set of influences discussed—the Russian revolutionary traditions, the writings of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin, and the operational code—had a significant effect on Soviet policy.
