Gorbachev’s Foreign Policy and the Loss of the Soviet Empire

Abstract

When Mikhail Gorbachev was nominated for the leader of the Soviet Union in March 1985, when the economic, political and social crises of the socialist system had been already inevitable. But even the experts of the Eastern Block would not have thought that within a few years one of the superpowers of the bipolar world order ceased to exist of itself. Mainly based on documents this study intends to describe the most important factors which conducted the collapse of the Soviet Union. The aim of this paper is to analyse the evolution of the foreign and the security policy thinking of Gorbachev and his colleagues in the second half of the 1980’s. We would like to make the case for the fundamental changes in the empirical stance were the main reason which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.