ABSTRACT
The maintenance of the Soviet Union's predominant position in Eastern Europe, i.e., mainly the safeguarding of its own military, political, economic, and ideological control over the six buffer states—Poland, GDR, CSSR, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria—continues to hold first place on its foreign policies priorities scale. All these states are members of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO), and together with the USSR form the real core of the economic community of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). This also encompasses the socialist developing countries, Cuba, Vietnam, and the Mongolian People's Republic. The only other thing that claims the Soviet Union's foreign policy energies and economic military potential to a comparable degree is the consolidation of its position as a world power equal to the US, in the dangerously tense relationship between offensive superpower rivalism and defensive avoidance of direct military conflict between the two superpowers.
