What Do Scholars Know about Soviet Foreign Policy

It has been almost a quarter-century since Daniel Bell observed that 'the road to hell must be paved twice over with the thousands of books claiming to discover the truth about Russia/1 In the interim, yet more publications have appeared and new methods have been introduced to the study of Soviet politics, domestic and foreign. During the 1960s and 1970s, in fact, there appeared to be emerging a reasonably coherent consensus among Western scholars about what it was that we, as specialists, knew about Soviet foreign policy.2 But, the widespread realization that the Soviet Union had become, for the first time really, a power with global military force projection capabilities; the equally widespread sense that there had been a shift during the 1970s in the global distribution of power between the United States and the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union's manifest build-up of its strategic weaponry, its navy, and its conventional weapons, most notably in central Europe; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an action in some ways both surprising and ominous against the backdrop of traditional Soviet behaviour; the Soviet 'non-invasion' of Poland, a 'non-action' in some respects as puzzling as the Soviet action in

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