1 - Introduction: pre-perestroika patterns

Summary

The Soviet Union is central to British defence policy and Moscow considers London to be a pivotal member of the Western alliance. Yet relations between the Soviet Union and Britain have attracted little attention and less analysis. The Soviet literature is smaller than that on relations with France or West Germany and consists largely of descriptive historical surveys. What analysis exists is confined mostly to studies of Britain and British politics which pay scant attention to relations with the USSR. On the Western side there is remarkably little on contemporary relations between the two countries. We have a number of good historical studies, concentrating mostly on the pre- and immediate postwar periods. The sparseness of the literature on the last twenty years is

highlighted by the fact that two reports of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee provide perhaps the fullest information and comment on the recent period. Britain hardly figures in the relatively small body of literature on Soviet relations with Western Europe and what treatment it attracts is typically couched in security terms.

The thin coverage of Soviet-British relations in the academic literature is a product of both scholarly focus and the nature of the subject. British foreign policy questions, outside the defence and security areas, have until very recently attracted surprisingly little academic interest. Analysts working in the Soviet foreign policy field have long neglected relations with the states of Western Europe by comparison with their extensive concern towards relations with the US and the Third World. The relative neglect of British-Soviet relations in the literature reflects not just the vagaries of academic fashion but the nature of the relations themselves.