Foreign relations of the Soviet Union | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: Subhajit Sahu
Date: 2018-11-29

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Foreign relations of the Soviet Union

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SUMMARY
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At the time of the founding of the Soviet Union (the USSR) in 1922, most governments internationally regarded the Soviet state as a pariah because of its advocacy of communism, and thus most states did not give it diplomatic recognition. Less than a quarter century later the Soviet Union not only had official relations with the majority of the nation-states of the world, but had progressed to the role of a superpower.
By 1945 the USSR—a founding member of the United Nations—had become one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, giving it the right to veto any of the Security Council's resolutions (see Soviet Union and the United Nations). During the Cold War, the Soviet Union vied with the United States of America for geopolitical influence; this competition manifested itself in numerous treaties and pacts dealing with military alliances and trade agreements, and in proxy wars.
The USSR had close relations with the socialist states that were established in the territories its army occupied in the aftermath of the Second World War, forming both military and economic cooperation organizations. In 1948, diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia disintegrated over mutual distrust between their leadership. A similar split happened with Albania in 1955 over changes in policy during the process of de-Stalinization.
Tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States reached an all-time high during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, in which Soviet missiles were placed on the island of Cuba well within range of US territory. This was retrospectively viewed as the closest the world ever came to a nuclear war. After the crisis was resolved, relations with the United States gradually eased into the 1970s.
In 1978, a revolution in Afghanistan brought to power a socialist government which, amid internal power struggles and foreign intervention, requested the neighboring Soviet Union to send military aid. Soviet intervention was seen as a hostile invasion by the United States and its allies, who funded the counter-revolutionary Mujahadeen, and thus led to a return to hostilities which were greatly exacerbated in the following years. When Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, he sought to restructure the Soviet Union to resemble the Scandinavian model of western social democracy and thus create a private sector economy. He removed Soviet troops from Afghanistan and began a hands-off approach in the USSR's relations with its European allies. This was well received by the United States, which led to, inadvertently, the collapse of the Soviet economy and, in 1991, the dissolution of the USSR and the end of the Cold War.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs headed Soviet foreign policy. Andrei Gromyko served as the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs for nearly thirty years (1957–1985).