The Soviet Study of International Relations.

• Author: Reed, Leonard

The Soviet Study of International Relations. Allen Lynch. Cambridge University Press, $34.50. Like Honda, Marx and Lenin made it simple: In the competition to sell their goods abroad, the capitalist nations would eventually go to war and destroy each other, and the workers of the world would rise up and unite in a glorious socialist brotherhood.

Bound by the straitjacket of dogma, Soviet analyses of international relations have not usually been taken seriously by western scholars. With the death of Stalin, it became somewhat less dangerous to life and limb for Soviet social scientists to look around and write about how the world had changed since Marx and Lenin. They couldn't, of course, repudiate the teachings of the gods upon which the communist state was founded. So they cloaked--and were allowed to cloak--their heresies under the new science of "creative Leninism."

Allen Lynch, a fellow of the Institute for East-West Security Studies, assesses the mixed success of the newer approach.

Several developments have made it necessary for Soviet leaders to accept what their social scientists have been hinting at for some time: > In the nuclear age, the capitalist countries are not going to war with each other, and if they did, it would be hazardous to the health of any socialist onlookers; therefore, the idea of the inevitable triumph of socialism as a result of the "imperialists" self-destructing is nonsense. > The capitalist countries are not doomed by internal contradictions and, in fact, will be around for a long time--perhaps centuries. > In spite of Lenin's view that in a socialist order peace would prevail, the greatest threat to the security of the Soviet Union may turn out to be not the United States but its socialist neighbor--and Russia's historical enemy--China.

They see the United States as the fulcrum of both the Japan-U.S.-Europe economic powerhouse and, of the China-U.S.-Soviet strategic teeter-totter. (They also see the irony of the U.S., because of the loss in Vietnam, redressing the balance by developing its rapport with China.) And even in the Third World, Soviet influence has brought questionable results, with an increasing awareness in Third World countries of the...