Troubled Waters

At last, Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost has yielded something that deeply impressed me. In Pravda the other day, one of his top ideologists wrote that the export of world revolution had become outdated as a foreign-policy concept for the Soviet government. The writer was Yevgeny Primakov, director of the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations.

Primakov went on: “The exclusion of the export of revolution is an imperative of the nuclear century.” Such a sweeping reversal of accepted doctrine needed an excuse, and the writer provided it. In essence, what he said was that the Soviet Union needs to spend less on weapons if it is ever to catch up with the United States in the economic sphere.

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Brian Crozier

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At last, Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost has yielded something that deeply impressed me. In Pravda the other day, one of his top ideologists wrote that the export of world revolution had become outdated as a foreign-policy concept for the Soviet government. The writer was Yevgeny Primakov, director of the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations.

Primakov went on: “The exclusion of the export of revolution is an imperative of the nuclear century.” Such a sweeping reversal of accepted doctrine needed an excuse, and the writer provided it. In essence, what he said was that the Soviet Union needs to spend less on weapons if it is ever to catch up with the United States in the economic sphere.