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Is the West sufficiently interested in the future of what Gorbachev stands for in foreign affairs, and in the realization of its own East-West agenda, to reply in kind? Viewed historically, contemporary Soviet attitudes toward foreign affairs may be interpreted as confirmation of a patient Western policy combining military strength and political flexibility toward the goal of encouraging a more realistic adaptation by the Soviet leadership to its international environment. Ironically, many of the contemporary Soviet statements on "mutual security", "interdependence," "global problems," and the intractability of Third World development, echo prevailing Western views of the early 1 9 7os.

Works by such individuals as Vladimir Petrovsky, now a Deputy Foreign Minister, or Georgi Shakhnazarov, deputy chief of the Central Committee department responsible for liaison with ruling foreign communist parties as well as head of the Soviet Political Sciences Association, have obvious import in shaping both the tenor of Introduction 7 discourse and the bounds of the acceptable in Soviet theorizing on international relations. Special importance will be given to analyzing the book reviews which regularly appear in Soviet historical, philosop­ hical, and social science journals that are devoted to examining both individual Western theorists, and indeed entire schools of Western theory of international relations, as well as exclusively Soviet works on the subject.

Yet Marx also saw that the prospects for Russian foreign policy were intimately tied to British foreign policy and its relation to the "Orient," which extended from the Balkans through the Middle East to include Afghanistan and I ndia. Anglo-Russian rivalry thus came to occupy a critical place in Marx's preoccupations with international politics. There is no neat way to separate these concerns from each other in Marx's thought. Each impinged on the others. Topics of particular interest, though, were the events of the revolutions of 1 848-g and the Russian threat to Europe and German politics; the Crimean War; the foreign policies ofNapoleon I I I in I taly, Mexico, and Western Europe, with the Franco-Prussian War of 1 870- 1 as the culminating point; and the American Civil War.