Soviet Foreign Policy Toward Japan: Linkage Between Domestic and International Determinants

Abstract

In this brief paper, I have decided not to provide just another chronological description of the foreign policy of the USSR toward Japan. First, if one wants to get basic historical facts, data, and information on this theme, one can rather easily obtain them in periodical or reference rooms of libraries. Second, I must confess that, being neither historian nor correspondent but a political scientist, I am more interested in theoretical analysis of, rather than in cofirmation of, what has been happening in the Soviet Union. Thus, what I want to do in the paper is to indentify and introduce the main factors which must influence or even shape Soviet policy-making toward Japan. It is my basic assumption that the foreign policy of the USSR cannot be ascribed merely to a single determinant, say, Marxist-Leninist ideology or a Stalinist dictatorship, but rather to a product or compound of several independent variables. I would like to classify these variables into two categories: the internal and the external.