Abstract
‘Peace’ and ‘socialism’ are the twin core values of Soviet ideology.1 World socialism was for Lenin the absolute value, and efficacy in advancing it the yardstick of all policy. Among relative values, subsidiary to socialism, in the Bolshevik outlook, peace soon came to occupy first place. Following early disillusionment with the strategy of revolutionary war, it was established as axiomatic that avoiding involvement in large-scale war was essential to the security of the Soviet state and to the cause of which that state was the bastion. This goal motivated both the search for collective security in the 1930s and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939–41. The experience of the Nazi invasion, of course, confirmed its vital importance.
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Notes
See Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American—Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan ( Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985 ), pp. 768–85
S. D. Shenfield, ‘Soviet thinking about the unthinkable’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol.41 no. 2 (Feb. 1985), pp,. 23–5.
Perhaps the most revealing testimony is that of Arkady N. Shevchenko, Breaking with Moscow (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), e.g. pp. 104–5, 180, 190, 280–1.
R. Judson Mitchell, Ideology of a Superpower: Contemporary Soviet Doctrine on International Relations ( Stanford, Cal.: Hoover Institution Press, 1982 ), p. 5.
Jerry F. Hough, The Struggle for the Third World: Soviet Debates and American Options ( Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1986 ), pp. 267–8.
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A. Bovin, The Observer, 24 April 1983.
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See F. Burlatsky, Planning of World Peace: Utopia or Reality? ( Moscow: Novosti, 1970 ).
I Mikhailov, ‘Mir v 2017-m’, Literaturnaya gazeta, 7 November 1984.
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© 1988 School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London
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Shenfield, S. (1988). The Long and Winding Road: Trajectories to Peace and Socialism in Contemporary Soviet Ideology. In: White, S., Pravda, A. (eds) Ideology and Soviet Politics. Studies in Russia and East Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19335-6_10
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