The Economic Decline and Soviet Foreign Policy

1All footnotes checked. 2/19/15.^ Randall Schweller and William Wohlforth, “Power Test: Evaluating Realism in Response to the End of the Cold War," Security Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring 2000) (link), p. 106. Wohlforth wrote or co-authored over 24 publications dealing with the issue. See William C. Wohlforth, “No One Loves a Realist Explanation,” International Politics Vo1. 48: Nos. 4/5 (July/September 2011) (link), p. 441. For a list of his works on the subject, see his c.v.(link).

2^ See especially William Wohlforth, “Realism and the End of the Cold War,” International Security 19, no. 3 (Winter 1994-95) (link); Schweller and Wohlforth, “Power Test” (link); Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War: Reevaluating a Landmark Case for Ideas,” International Security 25, no. 3 (Winter 2000-2001) (link); and Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, “Economic Constraints and the End of the Cold War,” in William Wohlforth, ed., Cold War Endgame: Oral History, Analysis, Debates (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003) (link).

3^ Wohlforth, “Realism and the End of the Cold War” (link), pp. 109-110; William Wohlforth, “Ideology and the Cold War,” Review of International Studies 26, no. 2 (April 2000) (link), p. 327.

4^ Brooks and Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War” (link), pp. 16, 18; Brooks and Wohlforth, “Economic Constraints” (link), pp. 277-78, 280.

5^ Brooks and Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War,” pp. 27-28 (link); Brooks and Wohlforth, “Economic Constraints” (link), pp. 281-82.

6^ Brooks and Wohlforth, “Economic Constraints” (link), pp. 282-83. See also Brooks and Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War” (link), p. 28.

7^ Wohlforth, “Realism and the End of the Cold War” (link), p. 110

8^ Mark Kramer, “Ideology and the Cold War,” Review of International Studies 25, no. 4 (October 1999) (link), p. 566. See also Richard Ned Lebow, “The Long Peace, the End of the Cold War, and the Failure of Realism,” International Organization 48, no. 2 (Spring, 1994), pp. 263-64 (link); and Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), esp. p. 157. The Soviet leadership before Gorbachev became general secretary, English writes, was “unable to accept even minor changes.” But he goes on to suggest that Andropov seemed to be getting ready to tackle the issue at a fairly basic level (p. 174); he also notes that as early as 1979 Gorbachev—then a candidate member of the Politburo and a protégé of Andropov’s—had turned to the “leading reform economists” in search of new ideas (p. 182). This sort of interpretive dissonance is fairly common in the literature. Volkogonov, for example, says that Andropov thought hard about the economic problem and that he seemed to favor at least a degree of decentralization. “From his hospital bed,” he writes, the dying Andropov sent “note after note to the Politburo and Central Committee apparatus, trying somehow by an effort of mind and will to focus those bureaucratically ossified bodies to take some decision on the real problems of the state and society. It is impossible not to give him credit for his courage.” Dmitri Volkogonov, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire: Political Leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 351, 377-78. But elsewhere he strikes a very different note, suggesting that Andropov was simply incapable of “proposing deep reforms,” and that even if he had been healthy and lived longer “with his habits and outlook he could have changed nothing in a fundamental way. Ibid., pp. 343, 347. My own view is that Andropov knew that the issue had to be dealt with, but that he felt that for both substantive and internal political reasons it had to be approached in a relatively cautious way. The attitude was reflected in some remarks he made to the famous East German spymaster Markus Wolf about how the repression of various groups that had suffered under the Soviet system could be ended: “We cannot carelessly try to solve all of these problems in these difficult times,” Andropov said. “If we open up all the valves at once, and people start to express their grievances , there will be an avalanche and we will have no means of stopping it.” Markus Wolf, Man without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster (New York: Random House, 1997), pp. 242-43 (link).

9^ Brooks and Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization, and the End of the Cold War” (link), pp. 28-30. For the evidence on Poland, see n. 67 on p. 30.

10^ Kramer, “Ideology and the Cold War” (link), pp. 566-67.

11^ See Politburo session, December 10, 1981, in Mark Kramer, “Soviet Deliberations during the Polish Crisis, 1980-1981,” CWIHP Special Working Paper No. 1 (Washington: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1999) (link), doc. 21, p. 164-68.

12^ See Chapter One above [give page refs].

13^ Thus the graph Brooks and Wohlforth give in their 2000/2001 International Security article (link) to support the claim that it was only in the mid-1970s that the Soviet economy “took a sudden turn for the worse” seems to show that the decline began in the late 1960s (pp. 15-16). And the graph they present to support the claim that the “early 1980s marked the beginning of the longest period in the post-World War II era in which average Soviet growth rates fell behind those of the United States” actually suggests that that period began a full decade earlier—that is, around 1974 when the two growth rate curves crossed (pp. 19-20). Indeed, they themselves write that “according to the most recent CIA estimate”—which they seem to view as if anything presenting too rosy a view of Soviet performance—“the Soviet economy reached an all-time peak of 57 percent of U.S. gross national product in 1970,” implying that the Soviet growth rate was essentially less than America’s essentially from that point on (p. 21). Finally, their claim that “for the first time in the Cold War era,” it had become clear in the early 1980s “that barring some dramatic turnaround the Soviet Union would never close the gap in brute economic output with the United States, to say nothing of closing the gap in technology” (p. 19) is somewhat at variance with their point that America’s “relative position stabilized after 1960” (p. 22).

14^ Adam Ulam, “U.S.-Soviet Relations: Unhappy Coexistence,” Foreign Affairs 57, no. 3 (1978) (link), p. 568. See also Adam Ulam, “The World Outside,” in Robert Byrnes, ed., After Brezhnev: Sources of Soviet Conduct in the 1980s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), pp. 347-48, 350.

15^ Adam Ulam, The Rivals: America and Russia since World War II (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 378. See also Adam Ulam, Dangerous Relations: The Soviet Union in World Politics, 1970-1982 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 310-13.

16^ Walter Laqueur, “U.S.-Soviet Relations,” Foreign Affairs 62, no. 3 (1983) (link), p. 581.

17^ Richard Pipes, “Can the Soviet Union Reform?” Foreign Affairs 63, no. 1 (Fall 1984) (link), pp. 50, 59.

18^ “X” [George Kennan], “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947) (link), esp. pp. 570-71. See also George Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin ((Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), esp. pp. 166, 251-52.

19^ See Alexander Gerschenkron, “The Stability of Dictatorships,” originally delivered as a lecture at Yale in 1963, and reprinted in Alexander Gerschenkron, Continuity in History and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968). The dictatorship’s “thirst for enemies,” he wrote (p. 320), “cannot be quenched as long as the system continues in existence.” It was for this reason, in his view, that “Stalin initiated, in the fall of 1945, the policy of the cold war,” but that policy outlived Stalin: “In order to pose as the defender of the nation from foreign threats, Soviet Russia has untiringly conjured up one crisis after the other.”

20^ Sonnenfeldt to Kissinger, January 7, 1971, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, vol. 13, pp. 264-65. (link).

21^ Pipes, “Can the Soviet Union Reform?” (link), p. 60.

22^ Robert Conquest, “A New Russia? A New World?” Foreign Affairs 53, no. 3 (April 1975) (link), p. 494.

23^ Foy Kohler and Mose Harvey, eds., The Soviet Union, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A Colloquy of American Long Timers in Moscow (Miami: University of Miami Center for Advanced International Studies, 1975), pp. 195, 198.

24^ Marshall D. Shulman, “Toward a Western Philosophy of Coexistence,” Foreign Affairs 52, no. 1 (October 1973) (link), pp. 37-38.

25^ Jack F. Matlock, Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray—and How to Return to Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 33. This is still a very common view, even among scholars. See also English, Russia and the Idea of the West, esp. pp. 119-23, and Gerharrd Wettig, “Entspannung, Sicherheit und Ideologie in der sowjetischen Politik 1969 bis 1979: Zur Vorgeschichte des NATO-Doppelbeschlusses,” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 68, no. 1 (2009), esp. pp. 115-16.

26^ Hans Morgenthau, “Changes and Chances in American-Soviet Relations,” Foreign Affairs 49, no. 3 (April 1971) (link), p. 436.

27^ Robert Conquest, Brian Crozier, John Erickson, Joseph Godson, Gregory Grossman, Leopold Labetz, Bernard Lewis, Richard Pipes, Leonard Schapiro, Edward Shils, and P.J. Vatikiotis, “Détente: An Evaluation,” International Review 1 (Spring 1974). This was reprinted by the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Arms Control, in June 1974 (link), and is discussed in Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999) (link), pp. 247-48.

28^ William Hyland, “U.S.-Soviet Relations: The Long Road Back,” Foreign Affairs 60, no. 3 (1981) (link), p. 540.

29^ Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) (link), p. 38.

30^ William Odom, “The Pluralist Mirage,” The National Interest, no. 31 (Spring 1993) (link), p. 106, republished in Nikolas Gvosdev, ed., The Strange Death of Soviet Communism: A Postscript (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2008) (link).

31^ Thus according to John Lewis Gaddis writing in 1999, Kissinger was “surprisingly open about his strategy.” His “annual reports as national security adviser under Nixon,” Gaddis wrote, “together with his speeches as Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford, set out his objectives with extraordinary candor and clarity.” John Lewis Gaddis, “The Old World Order,” New York Times, March 21, 1999, p. 385 (link). See also William Wohlforth, The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions during the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 213.

32^ Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, rev. ed. (Washington: Brookings, 1994), pp. 39, 1139; and Raymond Garthoff, “Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan,” final report to the National Council for Soviet and East European Research (December 1982), pp. 3-4 (link).

33^ See Evelyn Goh, “Nixon, Kissinger, and the ‘Soviet Card’ in the U.S. Opening to China, 1971–1974,” Diplomatic History 29:3 (June 2005) (link), pp. 484-85.

34^ Kissinger-Pompidou meeting, May 18, 1973, Digital National Security Archive, item number KT00728 (link), pp. 4-6. See also the account based on the French record of this meeting, in Georges-Henri Soutou, “Le Président Pompidou et les relations entre les Etats-Unis et l’Europe,” Journal of European Integration History 6, no. 2 (2000) (link), p. 134. For an English translation, see Georges-Henri Soutou, “Georges Pompidou and U.S.-European Relations,” in Marc Trachtenberg, ed., Between Empire and Alliance: America and Europe during the Cold War (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 181. See also Kissinger’s comments to Chinese UN ambassador Huang, August 4, 1972, and July 6, 1973, in William Burr, ed., The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New York: Free Press, 1998), pp. 73, 145.

35^ See various documents in Burr, Kissinger Transcripts, pp. 94, 177-178, 303, 386.

36^ Kissinger, Years of Renewal, pp. 267-68, 307, 867. Emphasis in original text. Kissinger of course was not totally inconsistent on this question, and sometimes he talked about Soviet policy as though nothing had changed. “To be sure,” he wrote, for example, on p. 248 of that book, “the Kremlin continued the ideological and geopolitical competition and had sought to enhance the relative position of the Soviet Union.”

37^ Ibid., pp. 112, 248. See Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (1962-1986) (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 195, for the passage Kissinger was referring to. Kissinger’s line, in fact, had begun to shift well before Kissinger’s book was published in 1999. See [GPP(14) n. 71; current chap3(1) n. 10] below. But people were skeptical: the new line was interpreted as evidence of Kissinger’s desire to improve his relationship with the right. See [GPP(14) n. 132; current chap4, n. 56] below.

38^ See, for example, Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 80-81. The general point here was understood by some of the more perceptive observers at the time. Note, for example, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, “Russia, America, and Détente,” Foreign Affairs 56, no. 2 (January 1978) (link), p. 292. It was “almost certain,” Sonnenfeldt wrote, that “disappointments about expected benefits from détente” had led the Soviets to question whether the costs of continuing with the détente policy were still “worth paying.” The comment is particularly worth noting because Sonnenfeldt had been one of Kissinger’s closest advisors.

39^ A number of experiments have in fact shown that “humans care strongly enough about fairness to punish others at a cost to themselves when these others deviate from fair principles.” Robert Trivers, “Mutual Benefits at All Levels of Life,” Science, new series, vol. 304, no. 5673 (May 14, 2004), p. 964 (link). See also Keith Jensen, “Punishment and Spite: The Dark Side of Cooperation,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B: Biological Sciences 365 (2010) (link).

40^ John Coffey (then with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy at the Pentagon), “The Path of Soviet Imperialism: A Review Essay,” Comparative Strategy 6, no. 1 (1987), p. 95.

41^ Alexander Dallin, “Bias and Blunders in American Studies on the USSR,” Slavic Review 32, no. 3 (September 1973) (link), pp. 566-67. Dallin was by no means the only serious observer to make this point. Volkogonov, for example, notes in passing that the Bolsheviks from the start had been “masters as double book-keeping, one for themselves and another for the ‘broad toiling masses.’” Volkogonov, Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, p. 319. Arbatov goes a little further and sees the radical talk (and, to a lesser extent, material support for “progressive” movements in the Third World) as rooted in a “fear of appearing insufficiently ‘revolutionary’”; the Soviet leaders were embarrassed by the fact that their foreign policy was becoming less ideologically-driven, and were looking “for ways to compensate for [their] realism.” Georgi Arbabov, The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), pp. 169-70, 185. Note also Vladislav Zubok, “The Soviet Union and Détente of the 1970s,” Cold War History 8, no. 4 (November 2008) (link), pp. 430, 433, and Kennan’s testimony in U.S. Congress, House Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, The Soviet Union: Internal Dynamics of Foreign Policy, Present and Future, hearings conducted in September and October 1977 (Washington: GPO, 1978) (link), p. 78. Kennan took issue there with Foy Kohler’s assumption that the official rhetoric showed what Soviet goals actually were. His point was not that the Soviet leaders did not in some sense believe what they said, but rather that they were bound to be concerned primarily with the very serious problems they had to face right now; “these ideas about the future world revolution” were not nearly so important. It is clear, moreover, from interviews conducted after the end of the Cold War that Soviet rhetoric (about, for example, the possibility of victory in nuclear war) was often not to be taken at face value, but was instead to be understood in ideological terms—even if it was not taken seriously, the ideology was something people still had to pay lip service to. See John Hines, Ellis Mishulovich and John Shulle, Soviet Intentions, 1965-1985 (McLean, VA: BDM, 1995) (link), vol. 1, pp. 26-27. There was some evidence available at the time that was taken in some quarters as showing that the Soviet leadership was actually thinking in aggressive terms, but that material is of dubious value and was not taken too seriously. See the appendix.

42^ See Jonathan Haslam, Russia’s Cold War: From the October Revolution to the Fall of the Wall (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 192-93, 229, 278-79. This account is of particular interest because Haslam was by no means trying to make the case for a realist interpretation of Soviet policy in this period. See my contribution to an H-Diplo roundtable on that book (link), pp. 19-22.

43^ Ilya Gaiduk, “Soviet Policy towards U.S. Participation in the Vietnam War,” History 81, no. 261 (January 1996) (link), p. 46. See also Ilya Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996).

44^ Gromyko submission to Politburo, January 13, 1967, quoted in Dobrynin, In Confidence, p. 157. Dobrynin quotes from a document the foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, had prepared, and which was submitted to the Politburo in January 1967, which, he says, outlined “the basis of Soviet policy.” “Intern1ational tension,” Gromyko wrote, did not on the whole “suit the state interests of the Soviet Union and its friends”; “the construction of socialism and the development of the economy” called for “the maintenance of peace.” The document is of interest because it bears on the common claim that the Soviets needed a certain degree of tension for internal political purposes.

45^ Anatoly Chernyaev, diary for 1972, entry for March 9, 1972 (link), pp. 2-4.

46^ Chernyaev diary for 1973 (link), entry for November 4, 1973, p. 69. See also Haslam, Russia’s Cold War, p. 276, and (for a more colorful account drawing on Chernyaev’s memoirs), Gordon Barrass, The Great Cold War: A Journey through the Hall of Mirrors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 185. My conclusions here are based in large part on the unpublished work of Galen Jackson.

47^ Kissinger meeting with State Department and White House officials, March 18, 1974, Digital National Security Archive [DNSA], Kissinger Transcripts [KT] collection, item no. KT01071, pp. 7-8 (link).

48^ Kissinger meetings with Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, March 11 (link), March 19 (link), and April 23, 1974, (link), National Security Adviser: Memoranda of Conversations, 1973-1977, in Digital Ford Presidential Library (link). Soviet policy in the region, in Kissinger’s view, was less objectionable than the policy some of America’s allies were pursuing. “The British and French are being complete shits,” Kissinger remarked in November 1973; they were “worse than the Russians.” French policy was particularly objectionable in his view: the French, he pointed out in March 1974, were “talk[ing] against” America’s Middle East policy; “if Gromyko had said such things we would say it was the end of détente.” Kissinger meeting with Schlesinger and other top U.S. officials, November 29, 1973, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, vol. 25, doc. 363 (link); Kissinger-Meir meeting, November 1, 1972, ibid., doc. 305 (link); Kissinger-Scheel meeting, March 3, 1974, p. 8, Digital National Security Archive, Kissinger Transcripts collection, item no. KT01052 (link).

49^ Kissinger meeting with Sonnenfeldt et al., August 1, 1974, DNSA/KT, item KT01268, pp. 1, 4-5 (link). A group Rostow headed had just issued a statement condemning the Soviets for the “incendiary” role they had played in the run-up to the Middle Eastern war. Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Foreign Policy Task Force, “The Question for Détente,” July 31, 1974, p. 3, available on the companion website for Justin Vaisse’s book Neoconservativism: The Biography of a Movement (link), item 13 (link). Vaïsse refers to this document as the “first head-on assault on Detente by Neoconservatives.” [new article on rostow in jcws]. Rostow, one should note, was by no means the only prominent observer to blame the Soviets for the war. That view was in fact fairly common at the time. Note, for example, the way Benjamin Lambeth referred in passing to “Soviet complicity in bringing about the October 1973 Middle East War” in a RAND paper he wrote in 1976. Benjamin Lambeth, Selective Nuclear Options in American and Soviet Strategic Policy, RAND R-2034-DDRE, December 1976 (link), p. 11.

50^ Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 251.

51^ See Haslam, Russia’s Cold War, pp. 291-92 (quoting from a book by Karen Brutents). See also Brutents’s comments in “U.S.-Soviet Relations and Soviet Foreign Policy toward the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s,” transcript of a workshop held in Lysebu, Norway, October 1994 (Oslo: Norwegian Nobel Institute, 1995) [henceforth referred to as “Lysebu I”], p. 35.

52^ Lysebu I, p. 34.

53^ Alexander Bessmertnykh comments, “The Collapse of Détente: From the March 1977 Moscow Meetings to the December 1979 Invasion of Afghanistan,” transcript of a conference held at Pocantico Hills, New York, October 1992 (link), p. 107. He was supporting a more general point about the Soviet leadership’s very limited interest in African questions that Dobrynin had just made (p. 106).

54^ Odd Arne Westad, “Moscow and the Angolan Crisis, 1974-1976: A New Pattern of Interevention,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, nos. 8-9 (1996/97) (link), p. 21. This is perhaps the most important scholarly study of the subject.

55^ Ibid., p. 25.

56^ Kornienko, in Lysebu I, p. 47. Kornienko was then head of the American Department at the Soviet Foreign Ministry.

57^ Kornienko comments, Lysebu I, pp. 47-48.

58^ Ibid., p. 35.

59^ Pocantico conference transcript (link), pp. 106-107.

60^ For the first quotation, see Braithwaite, Afgantsy, p. 81; on this general issue, see also ibid., pp. 7-8 and chap. 3, esp. pp. 73-74. For the second quotation, see Anatoly Dobrynin in “The Intervention in Afghanistan and the fall of Détente,” transcript of a conference held in Lysebu, Norway, September 1995. [henceforth cited as “Lysebu II”] (link), p. 92. A briefing book prepared for that conference, containing documents relating to this issue, is also available on the National Security Archive website (link). On this issue, see also Artemy M. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011) (link), pp. 17-24, esp. pp. 19, 24; Aleksandr Lyakhovskiy [Alexander Liakhovsky], “Inside the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and the Seizure of Kabul, December 1979,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper no. 51 (January 2007) (link); and Odd Arne Westad, “The Road to Kabul,” in Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Fall of Détente: Soviet-American Relations during the Carter Years (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997. Note alsof Jonathan Haslam’s argument that the Americans had “trick[ed] Moscow into invading Afghanistan,” in support of which he tells a story he had heard from General Odom: when news of the invasion reached Brzezinski in Washington, “he shot a clenched fist into the air triumphally: ‘They have taken the bait.’” Haslam, Russia’s Cold War, pp. 319-326 and p. 472 n. 11. For an analysis, see Justin Vaïsse, “De Harvard à la Maison-Blanche: Zbigniew Brzezinski et l'ascension des universitaires dans l'establishment de politique étrangère américaine pendant la guerre froide,” HDR thesis, Institut d’études politiques, Paris, December 2011, pp. 416-419.

61^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic Books, 2005), p. 77.

62^ Wayne Smith, “An Overview of Soviet Policy in Latin America,” in Wayne Smith, ed., The Russians Aren’t Coming: New Soviet Policy in Latin America (Boulder: Rienner, 1992), pp. 14, 20. This has long been the conventional view among experts in this area. Thus Robert Wesson noted in 1986 that in the 1960s, “when Fidel Castro was eager to turn the Andes into a big edition of the Sierra Maestra and to face the United States with multiple Vietnams in South America, the Soviets and their parties were decidedly opposed.” Robert Wesson, “The Soviet Way in Latin America,” World Affairs 149, no. 2 (Fall 1986) (link), p. 69.

63^ Andrew and Mitrokhin, World Was Going Our Way, p. 90. See also Smith, “An Overview of Soviet Policy in Latin America,” pp. 14-20.

64^ Quoted in Andrew and Mitrokhin, World Was Going Our Way, p. 59.

65^ Wesson, “Soviet Way in Latin America,” p. 69

66^ See especially Andrew and Mitrokhin, World Was Going Our Way, chap. 6. On the aid to the Salvadoran guerillas, see also Daniela Spenser, “Revolutions and Revolutions in Latin America under the Cold War,” Latin American Research Review, 40, no. 3 (2005) (link), p. 388. Spenser cites an archival source to support her point that the Soviets “did more than pay ‘only lip service to the Salvadoran armed struggle.’” (The internal quotation is from one of the books she was reviewing.)

67^ Smith, “An Overview of Soviet Policy in Latin America,” pp. 21, 23.

68^ See Nicola Miller, Soviet Relations with Latin America, 1959-1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 117.

69^ Quoted in Peter Shearman, “The Soviet Union and Grenada under the New Jewel Movement,” International Affairs 61, no. 4 (Autumn 1985) (link), p. 667. This analysis was based on the documents seized when the Americans invaded Grenada in 1983. See U.S. Department of State and Department of Defense, Grenada Documents: An Overview and Selection, ed. Michael Ledeen and Herbert Romerstein (Washington: GPO, 1984) (link) (alternate link), docs. 26 and 29.

70^ Sidney Hook foreword to Paul Seabury and Walter McDougall, eds., The Grenada Papers (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1984), p. xiv.

71^ Smith, “Overview of Soviet Policy in Latin America,” p. 23. See also Hal Brands, Latin America’s Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 150-51.

72^ Francis Fukuyama, “Moscow’s Post-Brezhnev Reassessment of the Third World,” RAND Report R-3337 (February 1986) (link), p. iii; and Stephen Sestanovich, “Do the Soviets Feel Pinched by Third World Adventures?” Washington Post, May 20, 1984, pp. B1-B2 (link). Emphasis added by Sestanovich.

73^ Fukuyama, “Moscow’s Post-Brezhnev Reassessment of the Third World” (link); and Francis Fukuyama, “Gorbachev and the Third World,” Foreign Affairs 64, no. 4 (Spring, 1986) (link) (pp. 715, 718 for the quotations). Fukuyama and Sestanovich were long-time friends, and Fukuyama’s RAND study (as he tells us on p. iii of that report) “initially grew out of a series of conversations” he had had with Sestanovich on these issues in the early 1980s. Fukuyama, like Sestanovich, was working for the Reagan administration during that period: he served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in 1981-82. Galia Golan also thinks that even in the late 1970s Andropov’s views about Soviet support for “progressive” forces in the Third World were more lukewarm than those of his colleagues. See Galia Golan, “Moscow and Third World National Liberation Movements: The Soviet Role,” Journal of International Affairs 40, no. 2 (Winter 1987) (link), p. 306.

74^ See Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, The Soviet Union and the Third World: An Economic Bind (New York: Praeger, 1983), esp. chapter one; Mark Katz, The Third World in Soviet Military Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), esp. pp. 11, 123, 145; and Golan, “Moscow and Third World National Liberation Movements,” p. 304.

75^ Andrew and Mitrokhin, World Was Going Our Way, pp. 466, 471, 473-74 (for the quotations), 480. The evidence supporting the view that the Soviets thought the “world was going our way” is actually quite thin. The phrase itself, which Andrew used as the title of his book, was originally cited in Westad, “Moscow and the Angolan Crisis” (link), p. 21. Karen Brutents, formerly with the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee, had used it in an interview with Westad in October 1993. But in 1978 Brutents himself had published an “unprecedently gloomy appraisal (as far as Soviet prospects were concerned) of economic trends” in the Third World; see Valkenier, Soviet Union and the Third World, p. 57. Certainly Brutents, looking back at this period in 1994, did not think Soviet policy is this area had been terribly successful. The Soviet decision to get involved in Angola he thought “was a mistake, an error—maybe it is a crime from point of view of our national interest.” The Soviets scarcely knew what they were doing; they “were caught in a web in Angola.” More generally, those Third World involvements scarcely made sense, in his view, from the standpoint of the real interests of the major powers: the Cold War had simply taken on a life of its own, and “we stopped considering whether it was useful for us, for any of us.” Lysebu I, pp. 34, 45. Andrew is not the only scholar who thinks the Soviets felt they were riding high in the mid- and late 1970s. According to Westad, the Soviet leadership during that period saw the “failures of the Western powers,” both in Vietnam and in the economic sphere, as “signs of a more comprehensive crisis in the West”—a crisis which “opened up new opportunities for enhancing the power and prestige of the Soviet Union and for promoting the Soviet model of development abroad.” The Soviets also perceived a “wave of social revolutions in the Third World,” weakening the West and “laying the foundation for socialist states of the future.” That “optimistic scenario,” he says, “was the main reason Soviet leaders agreed to a more active role for their country in Africa and Asia in the 1970s than during previous decades.” Odd Arne Westad, “The Fall of Détente and the Turning Tides of History,” in Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Fall of Détente: Soviet-American Relations during the Carter Years (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997) (link), pp. 11-12. To support that interpretation, Westad cited two passages from the transcripts of oral history conferences held under the auspices of the Carter-Brezhnev Project, but those passages to my mind fail to prove that the Soviets took the view Westad ascribed to them. The statements recorded there, in fact, point in the opposite direction. Dobrynin, for example, remarked in one of those passages that the Soviets had no plan “even to take advantage of the United States at every opportunity.” “Well, you thought we were taking advantage of opportunities,” he said. “But, really, in many cases we were—both sides—just overcome by events.” Pocantico Conference transcript (link), p. 105. The German scholar Michael Ploetz also thinks the Soviets felt they were riding high in the 1970s. In support of this view, he cites certain comments made by Boris Ponomarev and by Vadim Zagladin (in Ponomarev’s presence) in a meeting with an East German Communist leader in 1979 and 1980. Michael Ploetz, “Breshnews Langzeitstrategie im Spiegel von SED-Dokumenten,” in Heiner Timmermann, ed., Deutsche Fragen: Von der Teilung zur Einheit (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001), p. 53, citing Michael Ploetz, Wie die Sowjetunion den Kalten Krieg verlor: Von der Nachrrüstung zum Mauerfall (Berlin: Propyläen, 2000), pp. 86-87, 136. The arch-conservative Ponomarev might well have seen things in that way, but the fact that he expressed such views (and that his subordinate Zagladin took much the same line in his presence) does not really tell us much about how people like Brezhnev, Andropov, and probably even Gromyko viewed the situation. Zagladin’s real views were probably very different even at the time, but he had to worry about his position and “never spoke up against the opinions of the central committee.” Andrei Kolesnikov, “Gorbachev’s Aide Zagladin: When Word is Mightier than Deed” (based on an interview Kosenikov had had with Zagladin earlier than year), Sputnik International, November 22, 2006 (link).

76^ Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, “Soviet-Third World Relations: Ideology, Realities and New Thinking,” Russian History/Histoire Russe 29, nos. 2-4 (Summer-Fall-Winter 2002) (link), p. 503.

77^ Andrew and Mitrokhin, World Was Going Our Way, p. 475.

78^ Valkenier, Soviet Union and the Third World, p. 14.

79^ Danuta Paszyn, The Soviet Attitude to Political and Social Change in Central America, 1979-90 (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), p. 31, quoting Viktor Vol’skii, director of the Soviet Latin American Institute; and Miller, Soviet Relations with Latin America, p. 126. On this point, see also Fukuyama, “Gorbachev and the Third World” (link), p. 718.

80^ Golan, “Moscow and Third World National Liberation Movements” (link), pp. 303-304, 306. The text of Andropov’s June 1983 speech, which originally appeared in Pravda (June 16, 1983), was published in translation in the Current Digest of the Soviet Press 35, no. 25 (July 20, 1983) (link). For our purposes, the great emphasis Andropov placed on the Soviet economic problem in the first part of the speech is worth noting; the discussion of Soviet policy toward the Third World in the latter part of the speech should certainly be viewed in that context.

81^ Valkenier, “Soviet-Third World Relations” (link), pp. 499-503.

82^ Ibid., pp. 499, 500, 502, 503. That “Aesopian undercurrent,” Valkenier notes, “was recognized for what it was in Moscow” at the time, but had largely “escaped notice abroad.” She herself had been “told about the ruse at the time, but did not mention it” in her publications. She goes on to say (p. 501) that she had conducted many interviews with “leading Soviet academic experts on the Third World” during the years 1967-1989, that from the start she had “managed to gain their confidence,” and that they in turn enabled her “to look behind the official slogans and to grasp the gist of the evolving debates.”

83^ C. L. Sulzberger, An Age of Mediocrity: Memoirs and Diaries, 1963-1972 (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 480 (diary entry for November 23, 1968, recording a conversation with Thompson). Thompson, it is important to note given the questions we are interested in here, referred specifically in this context to how “the growth rate is slowing down” and to how “the role of the Communist party these days is anachronistic.” But later in the conversation he took a rather different line. Moscow, he said, was not interested in a spheres of influence deal; the pragmatists had declined in influence; the ideologists were “on top” and looked “at everything with an orthodox view that [was] out of step with world reality” (pp. 481-82). Those inconsistencies in analysis probably reflected the fact that this was a period of transition, and that Soviet policy itself at this time was not totally consistent—a point I will return to at the end of this chapter.

84^ CIA Research Study, “Soviet Policy and European Communism,” October 1976, CREST system (link), p. 15, and CIA, “Synopsis: Soviet Policy and European Communism,” September 1976, CREST system (link), p. 3. Indeed, “in November 1975, the Italian Communist Party worked with a number of European socialist parties to oust the communists from Lisbon, where they had held power since the overthrow in 1974 of the aged Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.” Barrass, Great Cold War, p. 200. It would be interesting to know if the Soviets had prodded the Italian Communists into doing so. The intelligence about the Soviets telling the Portuguese Communists to “go slow” was evidently leaked to the widely-read conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who reported it in April 1975. See their column “Détente and ‘Troubled Waters,’” Washington Post, April 14, 1975 (link).

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