Date of Award
1983
Document Type
Research Paper
Abstract
The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 came as a surprise to most of the world, including the Warsaw Pact nations and specially Czechoslovakia itself. The placement of offensive missiles in Cuba in 1962 by the Soviet Union came as a largely unexpected move to the United States, a crisis situation that provided no easy solution. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was another act of Soviet foreign policy that was not anticipated by the rest of the world until it occurred. The formulation of Soviet foreign policy remains, by and large, a mystery to all those who are not involved in the Soviet bureaucracy. Many attempts have been made by analysts in the United States to discover how decisions of foreign policy are arrived at by Soviet policy makers. It is a difficult task, since most of the decisions are made behind closed doors and carried out in secret. This paper is an attempt to identify some of the groups that have an impact on foreign policy in the U.S.S.R. as well as to discover the organizational structure of Soviet foreign policy decision making. I must warn the reader that this paper is highly speculative, since we do not have access to Soviet documents. It is possible, however, to examine Soviet foreign policy decisions of the past to formulate models of the decision making process and thus, perhaps, be able to better predict the future behavior of the Soviet Union in decisions of foreign policy.
Recommended Citation
Myers, P. (1983). Soviet Foreign Policy Decision-Making: An Analysis of Two Soviet Foreign Policy Decisions. Retrieved from https://poetcommons.whittier.edu/scholars/340