A useful if narrow study of West German policy toward the U.S.S.R. in the Schmidt and Kohl eras, based on extensive interviews in the Federal Republic and a close reading of the public record. Inter alia the author, an English academic, examines the special place of the ethnic Germans in the U.S.S.R. and German efforts to facilitate their right to emigrate. She also argues that Schmidt was less interested in German-German relations than in German-Soviet relations, less hopeful about West German-East German contacts than Willy Brandt had been.