Conflicting Images of the USSR

Recent studies of the role American Foreign Service officers played in the shaping of post-World War II U.S. policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union have portrayed them either as adherents of cooperation with Moscow in accord with the Atlantic Charter ideals or as advocates of a consistently hardline policy of confrontation.1 Actually, Foreign Service officers exhibited considerable vacillation in their assessment of Soviet objectives. Influenced by American liberal-democratic values and traditions, which were reinforced in the socialization process of the Foreign Service, the historical memory of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s, and the NaziSoviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, American diplomats harbored pronounced feelings of mistrust and animosity toward the Kremlin during the early war years. While this image never wholly dissipated, it was supplanted after 1943 by a more auspicious view of the Soviet Union that held sway in the minds of career diplomats, even as Russian armies were advancing into southeastern Europe, until the waning months of 1945, when it was, in turn, displaced by renewed suspicion and hostility

Charter · Democracy · Economic history · Feeling · Foreign policy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Socialization · Sociology · Soviet union · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Problems of Content Analysis in Foreign-Policy Research

  Deborah Welch Larson•International Studies Quarterly•1988

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