ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the links between the study of Soviet foreign policy and theory building in world politics. It aims to impart some sense of how one research practitioner has worked at the interface between world politics and Soviet foreign policy. The Soviet-East Europe hierarchical regional system can be used to assess the explanatory power of dependency theory as well. The evolution of Soviet perspectives on international politics in the late 1950s and early 1960s constituted fundamental departures from traditional Bolshevik-Stalinist modes of thinking. The chapter seeks to persuade the reader that trafficking at the intersection of world politics and Soviet foreign policy is advantageous to each area of inquiry. It focuses on four areas of inquiry of interest to students of world politics, drawing upon Soviet materials. The areas are the comparison of various approaches to world politics, the comparison on international systems, mass and elite foreign policy attitudes and civil-military relations including the social determinants of military performance.
