St. Petersburg and Moscow: tsarist and Soviet foreign policy, 1814-1974

About this book

Covering a period of over a century and a half, this well-documented study traces the evolution of Russian foreign policy during the regimes of five tsars, from Alexander I to Nicholas II, and four Soviet leaders, from Lenin to Brezhnev. Like the tsars, the Soviet leaders dominated the formulation and implementation of foreign policy and determined the atmosphere of the relations of their state to the rest of the world. Until the Second World War the chief concern of both the tsarist and Soviet leadership focused on central Europe and the Balkan peninsula. Thereafter Soviet attention was drawn increasingly into other areas, where it faced the problems attendent on the rise of the United States as the predominent competitive great power, the victory of the Communist Party in China, and the breakup of the European colonial empires. An introductory chapter surveys the period from Peter the Great through Napolean, and a concluding chapter compares the achievements of the Soviet and tsarist periods. The first part of this books was originally published under the title A century of Russian Foreign Policy, 1814-1914. The Soviet section is entirely new.