The document provides an overview of the foreign relations of the Soviet Union from its formation after the Russian Revolution through the end of the Cold War. It discusses how the Soviet Union was initially treated as a pariah state but sought diplomatic recognition in the 1920s. Under Stalin, it transformed into an industrial and military power. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union established control over Eastern Europe and formed alliances like COMECON and the Warsaw Pact. Tensions with the US escalated during events like the Cuban Missile Crisis but also saw periods of détente. The Soviet war in Afghanistan strained relations with the West. Under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and its control over Eastern Europe collapsed,
The document provides an overview of the foreign relations of the Soviet Union from its formation after the Russian Revolution through the end of the Cold War. It discusses how the Soviet Union was initially treated as a pariah state but sought diplomatic recognition in the 1920s. Under Stalin, it transformed into an industrial and military power. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union established control over Eastern Europe and formed alliances like COMECON and the Warsaw Pact. Tensions with the US escalated during events like the Cuban Missile Crisis but also saw periods of détente. The Soviet war in Afghanistan strained relations with the West. Under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and its control over Eastern Europe collapsed,
The document provides an overview of the foreign relations of the Soviet Union from its formation after the Russian Revolution through the end of the Cold War. It discusses how the Soviet Union was initially treated as a pariah state but sought diplomatic recognition in the 1920s. Under Stalin, it transformed into an industrial and military power. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union established control over Eastern Europe and formed alliances like COMECON and the Warsaw Pact. Tensions with the US escalated during events like the Cuban Missile Crisis but also saw periods of détente. The Soviet war in Afghanistan strained relations with the West. Under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and its control over Eastern Europe collapsed,
took over the old Russian Empire in 1918, they faced enormous odds against the German Empire due to World War I, and then again against both domestic and international enemies in the bitter civil war. Czarist Russiawas reorganized as the Soviet Union in 1922. At first, it was treated as an unrecognized Pariah state because of its repudiating the tsarist debts and threats to destroy capitalism at home and around the world. By 1922, Moscow had repudiated the goal of world revolution, and sought diplomatic recognitionand friendly trade relations with the world, starting with Britain and Germany. Trade and technical help from Germany and the United States arrived in the late 1920s. Under dictator Joseph Stalin, the country was transformed in the 1930s into an industrial and military power. After the appeasementpolicy of Britain and France (which Stalin called "pro-fascist"), the Soviet Union shifted from a strategy of antifascist collective security to one of national security. By signing a treaty with Germany in 1939 the Soviet Union hoped to create a buffer zone between them and Germany. In 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union that reached the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow. However, the Soviet Union proved strong enough to defeat Nazi Germany, with help from its key allies.
In 1945 the USSR became one of the five permanent
members of the UN Security Council—along with the United States, Britain, France, and China, giving it the right to vetoany of the Security Council's resolutions (seeSoviet Union and the United Nations). By 1947, American and European anger at Soviet control over Eastern Europe led to a Cold War, with Western Europe organized economically with large sums of Marshall Plan money from Washington. Opposition to the danger of Soviet expansion form the basis to the NATOmilitary alliance in 1949. There was no hot war, but the Cold War was fought diplomatically and politically across the world by the Soviet and NATO blocks.
The Kremlin controlled the socialist states that it
established in the parts of Eastern Europe its army occupied in 1945. After eliminating capitalism and its advocates, it linked them to the USSR in terms of economics through COMECON and later the military through the Warsaw Pact. In 1948, relations with Yugoslavia disintegrated over mutual distrust between Stalin and Tito. A similar split happened with Albania in 1955. Like Yugoslavia and Albania, China was never controlled by the Soviet Army. The Kremlin wavered between the two factions fighting the Chinese Civil War, but ultimately supported the winner, Mao Zedong. Stalin and Mao both supported North Korea in its invasion of South Korea in 1950. But the United States and the United Nations mobilized the counterforce in the Korean War (1950–53). Moscow provided air support but no ground troops; China sent in its large army that eventually stalemated the war. By 1960, disagreements between Beijing and Moscow had escalated out of control, and the two nations became bitter enemies in the contest for control of worldwide communist activities.
Tensions between the Soviet Union and the United
States reached an all-time high during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, in which Soviet missiles were placed on the island of Cuba well within range of US territory as a response to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and to deter more US attacks. This was retrospectively viewed as the closest the world ever came to a nuclear war. After the crisis was resolved, relations with the United States gradually eased into the 1970s, reaching a degree of détente as both Moscow and Beijing sought American favor.
In 1979 a socialist government took power in
Afghanistan but was hard-pressed and requested military help from Moscow. The Soviet army intervened to support the socialists, but found itself in a major confrontation. The presidency of Ronald Reagan in the United States was fiercely anti-Soviet, and mobilized its allies to support the guerrilla war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The goal was to create something akin to the Vietnam War which would drain Soviet forces and morale. When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, he sought to restructurethe Soviet Union to resemble the Scandinavian model of western social democracy and thus create a private sector economy. He removed Soviet troops from Afghanistan and began a hands-off approach in the USSR's relations with its Eastern European allies. This was well received by the United States, but it led to the breakaway of the Eastern European satellites in 1989, and the final collapse and dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The new Russia, under Boris Yeltsin, was no longer communist.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs implemented the
foreign policies set by Stalin and after his death by the Politburo. Andrei Gromykoserved as the Minister of Foreign Affairs for nearly thirty years (1957–1985).
Ideology and objectives of Soviet foreign policy
Commissars and ministers
1917–1939
World War II Cold War (1947–1991)Edit
Main article: Cold War
The Soviet Union is seen in red while states in light
pink were satellites; Yugoslavia, a communist state that was a Soviet ally until 1948, is marked in purple; and Albania, a communist state which ceased being allied to the Soviet Union in the 1960s after the Sino-Soviet split, is marked in orange
EuropeEdit
Main article: Eastern Bloc
The Soviet Union emerged from World War II devastated in human and economic terms, but much enlarged in area. Militarily it was one of the two major world powers, a position maintained for four decades through its hegemony in Eastern Europe, military strength, involvement in many countries through local Communist parties, and scientific research especially into space technology and weaponry. The Union's effort to extend its influence or control over many states and peoples resulted in the formation of a world socialist system of states. Established in 1949 as an economic bloc of communist countries led by Moscow, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance(COMECON) served as a framework for cooperation among the planned economies of the Soviet Union, its allies in Eastern Europe and, later, Soviet allies in the Third World. The military counterpart to the Comecon was the Warsaw Pact.
The Soviet Union concentrated on its own recovery. It
seized and transferred most of Germany's industrial plants and it exacted war reparations from East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, using Soviet-dominated joint enterprises. It used trading arrangements deliberately designed to favor the Soviet Union. Moscow controlled the Communist parties that ruled the satellite states, and they followed orders from the Kremlin. Historian Mark Kramer concludes: The net outflow of resources from eastern Europe to the Soviet Union was approximately $15 billion to $20 billion in the first decade after World War II, an amount roughly equal to the total aid provided by the United States to western Europe under the Marshall Plan.[56]
Moscow considered Eastern Europe to be a buffer
zone for the forward defense of its western borders and ensured its control of the region by transforming the East European countries into subservient allies. In 1956, Soviet troops crushed a popular uprising and rebellion in Hungary and acted again in 1968to end the Czechoslovak government's Prague Spring attempts at reform. In addition to military occupation and intervention, the Soviet Union controlled Eastern European states through its ability to supply or withhold vital natural resources.
EspionageEdit
Main article: Soviet espionage
All sides in the Cold War engaged in espionage. The
Soviet KGB ("Committee for State Security"), the bureau responsible for foreign espionage and internal surveillance, was famous for its effectiveness.[57] A massive network of informants throughout the Soviet Union was used to monitor dissent from official Soviet politics and morals.[58][59] Historian Raymond L. Garthoff concludes there probably was parity in the quantity and quality of secret information obtained by each side. The Soviets probably had an advantage in terms of HUMINT (espionage) and "sometimes in its reach into high policy circles." Did it matter? In terms of decisive impact Garthoff concludes:
We also can now have high confidence in the
judgment that there were no successful “moles” at the political decision-making level on either side. Similarly, there is no evidence, on either side, of any major political or military decision that was prematurely dis‐ covered through espionage and thwarted by the other side. There also is no evidence of any major political or military decision that was crucially influenced (much less generated) by an agent of the other side.[60]
in terms of the impact of intelligence on national policy
it was not so much the minute details, or capture of top-secret plans that mattered most. Instead, every major country used its intelligence services to develop complex images of their adversaries, and to predict to the top leadership what they would do next.[61]
The USSR and East Germany proved especially
successful in placing spies in Britain and West Germany. Moscow was largely unable to repeat its successes from 1933 to 1945 in the United States. NATO, on the other hand, also had a few successes of importance, of whom Oleg Gordievsky was perhaps the most influential. He was a senior KGB officer who was a double agent on behalf of Britain's MI6, providing a stream of high-grade intelligence that had an important influence on the thinking of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He was spotted by Aldrich Ames a Soviet agent who worked for the CIA, but he was successfully exfiltrated from Moscow in 1985. Biographer Ben McIntyre argues he was the West's most valuable human asset, especially for his deep psychological insights into the inner circles of the Kremlin. He convinced Washington and London that the fierceness and bellicosity of the Krem‐ lin was a product of fear, and military weakness, rather than an urge for world conquest. Thatcher and Reagan concluded they could moderate their own anti-Soviet rhetoric, as successfully happened when Mikhail Gorbachev took power, thus ending the Cold War.[62]
AfricaEdit
Main article: Soviet Union-Africa relations
Stalin made Africa a very low priority, and discouraged
relationships or studies of the continent. However the decolonizationprocess of the 1950s and early 1960s opened new opportunities, which Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was eager to exploit. The Kremlin developed four major long-term policy goals: 1) To gain a lasting presence on the continent. 2) To gain a voice in African affairs. 3) To undermine Western/ NATO influence, especially by identifying capitalism with Western imperialism. 4) After 1962, it fought hard to prevent the People's Republic of Chinafrom developing its own countervailing presence. At no time was Moscow willing to engage in combat in Africa, although its ally Cuba did so. Indeed, the Kremlin at first assumed that the Russian model of socialized development would prove attractive to Africans eager to modernize. That did not happen, and instead the Soviets emphasized identifying likely analyze and giving them financial aid and munitions, as well as credits to purchase from the Soviet bloc. Although some countries became allies for a while, including Angola, Somalia, and Ethiopia, the connections proved temporary. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian influence greatly diminished.[63]
The Middle EastEdit
Main article: Soviet Union and the Arab–Israeli conflict
Main article: Soviet Middle Eastern Foreign Policy
during the Cold War
Relations with IsraelEdit
The first source of tension in relations between Israel
and the Soviet Union occurred on February 9, 1953 (four weeks before the death of Joseph Stalin), when the USSR severed relations with Israel. The USSR used a bomb incident against the Soviet Legation in Tel Aviv as an excuse to end relations and claimed that the government was responsible.[64] The Israeli gov‐ ernment received this news with shock and concern. This was the first breach in diplomatic relations that Israel had experienced with a superpower. There is a general consensus that Israeli charges against the USSR Doctors' Plot and public want for improvement for the Soviet Jews were deciding factors. Without Israel's fierce hostility to the false allegations of the Doctors' Plot, the Soviet Union most likely would not have ended relations. After the rupture, Israel continued to speak out against the Doctors' Plot, and successfully attracted international attention.[64]
After the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet Union's
foreign policy was less hostile. The new Soviet Prime Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, presented a new policy of openness and peacefulness. This new policy inspired Israel to initiate relations with the USSR again, on condition that Israel would no longer criticize the USSR publicly, especially regarding the Soviet Jews. Moscow began to support the Arab states in the Arab-Israeli conflict in order to use this conflict for its own confrontation with the West.[64]
On February 2, 1958[65] Egypt and Syriadeclared the
establishment of a common federation: the United Arab Republic.[64] The destruction of Israel was their main goal. In 1955, the USSR made an arms deal with Egypt.