V. KORGUN Doctor of Historical Sciences Relations between Russia and Pakistan over the past decades have been shaped mainly by external factors. In the past, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union and Pakistan belonged to opposing socio-political systems, were members of opposing military-political blocs-Warsaw and SENTO and SEATO, respectively. Pakistan pursued a pro-American foreign policy and maintained essentially hostile relations with India. Under these circumstances, the USSR supported India, which pursued a policy of non-alignment. However, despite such a one-sided foreign policy orientation, the USSR and Pakistan sought to cooperate. So, in 1966, the Soviet Prime Minister A. Kosygin acted as a mediator in the military conflict between India and Pakistan. At the same time, in the 60s, relations between the two countries developed somewhat with the signing of the agreement on cooperation in the development of the oil industry of Pakistan in 1961. The revival of economic ties was facilitated by the visits of President M. Ayub Khan to the Soviet Union in 1965 and 1967 and A. Kosygin to Pakistan in 1968 and 1969. Cooperation between the two countries continued to develop after the 1971 crisis in Pakistan, especially in the field of energy. The further development of Soviet-Pakistani relations was negatively affected by the events of the late 1970s in Afghanistan - the coup d'etat of 1978 and the rise to power of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. However, the Afghan problem has long been an irritant in relations between the two countries. Sharp contradictions between the two neighbors, the refusal of Afghanistan to join the SENTO bloc, the attempts of Kabul to solve the problem of Pashtunistan and its subsequent reorientation to the Soviet Union-all this complicated Soviet-Pakistani contacts. At the same time, the normalization of Pakistan-Afghanistan relations in the second half of the 1970s and a certain cooling of relations between Moscow and Kabul ... Read more