The Perception of Soviet Foreign Policy During the Perestroika Period on the Materials of T. G. Stepanov-Mamaladze Diaries

The research explores the ideological and cultural roots of the “new political thinking” that reshaped the soviet foreign policy in the Perestroika period. The paper focuses on actor, who articulated a new discourse within the confines of the socialist ideology: the assistant and speechwriter of Eduard Shevardnadze (the soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs during the Perestroika period) T.G. Stepanov-Mamaladze. The analysis of the main source, his diaries, reveals of the nature of changes in the soviet foreign policy in the mid-1980s and the first years of the 1990s focusing on the past experience in the mind-set of the actor by the end of the Cold War. The research traces interconnections between Perestroika’s foreign policy and a domestic intellectual and public perception of the reforms articulated among political intelligentsia of the Thaw generation. Using the methodology of the soviet subjectivity and the Zubok’s intelligentsia worldview the study displays the patterns which acknowledged special perception of the foreign policy course, which make it possible to finish the Cold War, dissolve an alliance of the Warsaw Pact countries and end the war in Afghanistan.