The Priorities of Soviet Foreign Policy Today

A statement of Soviet foreign policy's own agenda, by three specialists of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, and a book whose title stakes everything on being current.

Its chapters set out the priorities as Moscow defined them at the turn of the decade: the strategic balance and arms limitation, European security after Helsinki, relations with the United States and with Western Europe, the socialist community and Comecon, the developing world and the non-aligned movement, and the quarrel with Peking. For anyone who wants the official agenda stated in order, with the reasoning attached, this is the compact version.

The dating is the thing to hold, and the introduction sets it out precisely. The substance stops moving in the spring of 1980: the last hard reference is the Warsaw Treaty Political Consultative Committee meeting of May 1980, a steel converter commissioned at Esfahan in April, and China breaking off the normalisation talks early that year. Laid over the top is a thin second layer - six references to the Twenty-Sixth Congress of February and March 1981, plus one endnote to Brezhnev's report.

The two layers are distinguishable by texture. The Twenty-Fifth Congress of 1976 is mentioned fourteen times and its positions are argued; the Twenty-Sixth gets six mentions and every one is empty, praising initiatives it never names. The Congress has been welded onto a finished manuscript.

By O. Bykov and others.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on what fell into the gap between the two layers.