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The Foreign Policy of Russia: Changing Systems, Enduring Interests. By Robert H. Donaldson and Joseph L. Nogee. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. 326p. $62.95 cloth, $23.95 paper.
Douglas W. Blum, Providence College
The strengths and weaknesses of this book become apparent quite early, when the authors survey historical tendencies in Russian policy under the tsarist and communist regimes. The overall tone is very balanced and cautious. Tsarist roots of Russian foreign policy are revealed in the vast terrain, northern climate, and lack of natural barriers, all of which fueled Russia's traditional obsession with security-and therefore also its expansionist impulse. At times, such as when the authors discuss shifts in Bolshevik policy, the narrative judiciously blends important observations with explanatory accounts. Thus, the emergence of balance-ofpower thinking under Lenin and Stalin is plausibly attributed to the Soviet Union's weakness. At the same time the cardinal, abiding peculiarity of Soviet policy is noted: the assumption that war between the two major systems was inevitable, a fact which can only be explained by ideological factors. For an introduction to the topic, the student could do considerably worse.
Yet, one soon begins to feel restless. The rehashing of these familiar arguments-unobjectionable as they seem at first glance-is ultimately a source of concern. The groundbreaking treatments of Russian and Soviet foreign policy by such writers as Fainsod, Roberts, Seton-Watson, Lowenthal, and Ulam set a standard for the early generations of Cold War scholarship and policymaking, and in doing so they emphasized the importance of massive, monolithic factors: balance of power, geography, single-party system, ideology, personality, and the like. Has the field not advanced? One looks in vain here for a more self-consciously critical treatment of causal assertions. For example, does weakness really lead to balance of power policies, or is this a tentative and undeveloped hypothesis that should be identified as such?
More important, doubts quickly surface about the analytical rigor employed. In concluding the first chapter, the authors state that "no single motive force can be found to explain tsarist Russian expansionism; rather, the influence of geography, regime type, the international system, and ideology all...