| In many analyses of the Cold War's end, the intellectual aspects of Mikhail Garbachev's new thinking are incidental to broader considerations of power. "Imperial withdrawal" was necessitated by domestic crisis and international decline, and the philosophy of new thinking is seen as largely epiphenomenal. By contrast, this study views the intellectual component of new thinking as central to policy change. Ideas had an autonomous existence, and interacted with considerations of power to shape a non-confrontational end to the Cold War.;New thinking's roots lie in a Westernizing academic-policy elite that emerged from the foreign study and international ties of the post-Stalin decades. Drawing on memoirs, interviews, and published and unpublished writings, this study traces the rise of a conciliatory-integrationist worldview--and attendant policy alternatives--over the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years. By the late 1970's, the ideas of liberal philosophers, scientists, economists and area experts were influential among a small group of Communist Party reformers. By the early 1980s, Gorbachev was consulting a circle of prominent new-thinking specialists. Their advice spurred his "Westernizing" domestic reforms and, against a hardline leadership majority, was critical to the radical foreign-policy turn that peacefully ended the Cold War. |
