This chapter examines the emergence of an ever closer energy relationship between Western Europe and the Soviet Union in the late Soviet period, leading to the construction of the first major natural gas export pipeline from Siberia to Europe.

By the early 1960s, Vietnam was firmly lodged in China's embrace. Khrushchev's commitment to Vietnam was limited, as he focused instead on relations with the United States. However, after his ouster in October 1964, Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, began to see Vietnam as an opportunity to demonstrate Moscow's revolutionary leadership. The Soviet Union's support for Vietnam served two purposes: establishing credibility in the revolutionary world and asserting its position as America's equal. As the war escalated, both Moscow and Beijing's commitment to Vietnam grew. Despite disagreements over military tactics, the Soviets won Hanoi's loyalty, largely because they supplied Vietnam with badly needed military aid. Yet the end of the war became a Pyrrhic victory for the Soviets. Moscow ended up investing heavily in Vietnam's reconstruction and industrialization, which contributed to the Soviet Union's later insolvency. This chapter highlights the importance of understanding the Vietnam War not only as an East–West struggle but also as an East–East struggle, with the Soviet Union and China competing for power and influence across the region.

This chapter recounts how the 1973 war in the Middle East became a test case for Brezhnev's vision of a condominium with the United States. The Yom Kippur War highlighted the fragility of detente and pointed to the inevitably competitive nature of the Soviet–American relationship. Although both the United States and the Soviet Union were interested in detente, competing pressures and the need to cater to diverse audiences created constraints on joint action. The Soviet Union craved American recognition but also wanted to be respected as a superpower with a wide clientele. The Kremlin's imperial overextension in the 1970s stemmed from a search for attributes of a superpower. For a time, the Soviets mistakenly believed they could achieve this hand in hand with the United States rather than in competition.

In the late 1960s, Brezhnev aimed to downplay the East–West ideological divide, prioritizing practical relationships over ideology. Worsening relations with China, demonstrated by the 1969 border clashes, heightened Moscow's fears of China. The prospect of an economic bonanza tempted the Soviets to reach out to France and West Germany in search of trade deals and access to markets. However, as this chapter shows, it was Nixon's visit to Beijing in February 1972 that awakened Brezhnev to the imperative of engaging with the United States. Despite America's ongoing war in Vietnam, he went out on a limb to host Nixon in Moscow. Brezhnev subsequently discovered that he and Nixon had much in common. He then strove to end the Cold War on terms that would approximate a Soviet–American condominium. This chapter argues, however, that the contradictions between the Soviet desire for American recognition and the Soviet quest for revolutionary legitimacy weakened the prospects for genuine superpower detente.

In the early 1980s, Soviet–US relations, which had deteriorated since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, reached a new low under President Ronald Reagan, who imposed sanctions on the USSR and escalated nuclear build-up. This chapter investigates Moscow's growing challenges: a quagmire in Afghanistan, and a crisis in Poland in 1980–81, which very nearly resulted in a Soviet military intervention. The chapter documents internal Soviet debate on the pros and cons of invading Poland to quash the anti-Communist protests. It then recounts the Kremlin's response to Reagan's militant rhetoric: increasing paranoia, fears of a pre-emptive strike, and a renewed interest in better relations with China.

By 1977–78, the Horn of Africa became a key area of Soviet–American rivalry, with both superpowers supporting rival regimes. Both the Soviets and the Americans wanted their clients to embrace specific legitimating discourses, such as human rights or Marxism-Leninism, establishing patterns of deference, recognition, and legitimation. By the late 1970s, China concluded that involvement in Africa was not worth the cost and retreated, while the Soviets continued despite the costs. Driven by inertia of proletarian internationalism, Moscow sought involvement in faraway struggles, seeking recognition as the leader of revolutionary forces. As before, the Soviets failed to see the contradiction between detente with the United States and supporting third world revolutions. Meanwhile, in the late 1970s, the Cold War was reshaped by China's transformation under Deng Xiaoping, who shifted focus from revolution to development. This strategic pivot led China to lean toward America, which the United States welcomed to contain the Soviet threat. Despite being based on tactical choices rather than shared values, this alignment deeply worried Soviet leaders.

This chapter offers a snapshot of detente in a downward spiral, illustrating just how fragile it ultimately proved to be, how susceptible it was to the logic of superpower rivalry, and how utterly dependent it was on domestic variables – especially in the United States. With Nixon's resignation in August 1974, detente – never stable – began to unravel. Crises in Cyprus and Africa, as well as the passage of the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which effectively denied the Soviet Union its Most Favored Nation status and further dampened the already dim prospects for Soviet–American trade, aggravated tensions between Moscow and Washington. Even the successful conclusion of the Helsinki Conference in the summer of 1975 failed to restore trust between the superpowers. Brezhnev's physical and mental decline contributed to a sense of paralysis in Soviet foreign policy. The Cold War returned by default.

Continuity in Russian strategy reflects a set of enduring predilections indicative of strategic culture preferences, and habitual responses to persistent, or recurring challenges. While individual leaders and their ideas matter, the pursuit of a geopolitical space where Russian interests predominate has remained central to Russian thinking, along with a quest for status, and influence as a Great Power. The strategy for pursuing these goals, and for dealing with other leading powers like the United States, has proven sticky. Contemporary Russian strategy reprises the offensive approach which defined much of the Soviet Union’s consensus, investing in the military means for direct competition and leveraging indirect approaches to sustain a contest against a much stronger opponent in the international system. Russian grand strategy has proven evolutionary: While it grapples with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the post-Cold War world, there is greater continuity than change in the calculus and ambitions that define Russian decision-making.

This chapter explores the relationship between Russian nationalism and official war memory during the zenith of nationalist participation in Soviet politics (1968–1980s). It focuses on some of the most explicit nationalist writings and the involvement of nationalist enthusiasts in late-socialist memory politics to determine the war’s place in the pro-regime nationalist imagination. As the chapter argues, Russian nationalists reveled in prerevolutionary Russian themes but largely abstained from claiming the war as an unambiguously Russian achievement. That is to say that at the peak of official support for Russian nationalist expression and activism, the Russocentric paradigm did not extend to official representations of victory, even among this paradigm’s most ardent supporters. In an era defined by the growth of Russian national self-expression, the victory myth retained its role as social leveler and instrument of pan-Soviet identity and mobilization. At the same time, however, several prominent nationalist writers and activists found ways to navigate the Soviet people doctrine by exploiting areas of ambiguity and overlap with the war’s official memory. By the end of the 1970s, among nationalist intellectuals and their supporters, this patriotic parallelism had begun to redefine the nature of victory in subtle but not insignificant ways.

This chapter considers the period of the war cult’s maturation (1960s–80s) as the victory myth came to eclipse alternative modes of patriotic expression. The chapter argues that late-socialist war commemorations, in line with the Soviet people doctrine, continued to dilute particularistic depictions of the Russian nation at war while channeling Russocentrism toward the contained outlets of prerevolutionary and early Soviet history, culture, and modernization narratives. But while authorities forced the most egregious claims about the Russocentric essence of victory underground, these ideas persisted at the margins of late-socialist culture, as well as outside the RSFSR, much as they had after the war. As the war cult grew in prominence, party-affiliated Russophile intellectuals occasionally contested the internationalist orientation of the dominant victory myth. In response, the Party promoted the war victory in a way that maximally overlapped with certain Russophile concerns (patriotism, love of the homeland, respect for tradition, anti-Westernism, etc.) while simultaneously enforcing the victory myth’s ideologically orthodox, pan-Soviet framing.