戦間期ソ連外交の政策決定システム

ソ連圏諸国の内政と外交

抄録

Many students of the Soviet foreign policy are turning increasing attention to the domestic aspects or factors which condition the making of Soviet foreign policy. Their general approach is to analyze the activities of the responsible personalities triggered by the imminence or occurrence of some important politicized issues. Though this approach is effective in making clear the dynamic nature of the seemingly static politics, it has pitfalls in itself. For example it inclines to set the routine decision making process in the blind spot. In order to comlement this methodological shortcoming, more attention should be paid to the systems, in which diplomatic ploblems are normally dealt with without or before becoming politicized issues. The purpose of this paper is to describe the change of these systems in the inter war period.
In this period three elemental foreign policy making systems can be discerned: the collective deliberation system in 1921-1927/8, the more complicate one of the 1930s, at the center of which stood the Politbure commission on foreign affairs, and the Stalin-Molotov consultating system.
In the first system, in which the members of the Politburo consulted with spokesmen of People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (PCFA), Chicherin's role in policy making seemed to be more substantial than his party rank suggested. Partly because he had conducted foreign affairs exclusively with Lenin for a long time, and partly because party leaders were too busy in party strife to keep their eyes on the foreign affairs after Lenin's death, Chicherin could exert significant influences in this area, though he had to fight with Litvinov in PCFA.
In the second system Litvinov's commissariat was challenged in the function of assembling and evaluating informations from abroad firstly by Karl Radek's small group at the private secretariat of Stalin, and then by the Foreign Section of the Central Committee Secretatiat. Though Litvinov was under tighter control of the party leadership, he could contribute to policy making above all through his direct advices to Stalin.
After the removal of Litvinov in May 1939, this cumbersome system gave way to the simpler one, in which Stalin played a more active role. In this system Molotov seemed to remain not so much a foreign policy specialist as a mere executor of his superior's orders. Perhaps it was due to the purges and Molotov's non-creative leadership which greatly atrophied the diplomatic apparatus. With this point in view it should be reconsidered that Molotov. and his Ministry played only the limited role in the postwar Soviet foreign policies.