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Foreign relations of the Soviet Union

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After the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks

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.

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