PREFACE

Since the end of the Cold War and the subsequent opening of government archives in Eastern and Central Europe, scholars have been able to obtain important documents from the other side of the Iron Curtain. These have reshaped our understanding of the foreign policies of Soviet bloc countries as well as the internal dynamics of the relationships between Moscow and its ‘junior allies’.¹ In an article in Diplomatic History at the turn of the century, Tony Smith developed the idea of ‘pericentrism’, in which he argued that junior allies on the periphery of the Cold War often pulled the super powers into new areas of conflict.²

Yet, the level of coordination between the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact junior allies in the developing world, as well as the degree of autonomy that each Eastern European state had in pursuing its own policies independent of Moscow, is an understudied topic in Cold War studies. We embarked on this project with the presumption that the relative level of autonomy enjoyed by Moscow's junior allies had varied over time, location and between Eastern European capitals. Since it would be nearly impossible for a lone scholar to have the requisite linguistic abilities and funding to tackle this topic individually, we have assembled a group of historians working in the archives of each of the former Soviet bloc states in an attempt to answer these questions collectively.

This volume is not comprehensive, of course, nor could such a collection of essays ever hope to be so. Nonetheless, by broadening the study of the Cold War in the Third World to include closer examinations of the roles played by the junior members of the Warsaw Pact, this volume – with its multidisciplinary approach and emphasis on multi-archival research (primary-source research for this project having been conducted in 12 different countries) – aspires to serve as inspiration for further research on the role that Moscow's junior allies played in the Cold War in the Third World.

We would like to thank the following individuals for offering peer-review comments on prospective chapters for this volume: Peter Busch, Ben Cowan, Craig Daigle, Elena Dragomir, Kristen Ghodsee, William Glenn Gray, Corina Mavrodin, Katalin Miklossy, Lise Namikas, Eric Pullin, Przemysław Gasztold, Massimiliano Trentin and Michal Zourek. Special thanks also go to Csaba Békés and Rob Waters for their valuable input on the Introduction. Finally, we would like to thank Tom Stottor, our acquisitions editor at I.B.Tauris, and Ian McDonald, our copy editor. This volume is a much better final product because of their involvement.

Notes

 1.The term ‘junior allies’ was first used in relation to the smaller states in the Warsaw Pact by Zbigniew K. Brzezinski in The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge, MA, 1967).

 2.Tony Smith, ‘New Bottles for New Wine: A Pericentric Framework for the Study of the Cold War’, Diplomatic History 24 (4) (2000), pp. 567–91.