As recent events have proved, the Soviet Union (and now Russia) and Syria have been close allies since World War II and such relationship appears as a direct legacy from the Cold War. Since the very beginning of the forties, the Soviet Union determined that geopolitical factors were to be taken into account in its strategy and their importance expanded in the following decade. From 1944 onwards, this partnership was enacted in several occasions. In 1944, Syria signed a Friendship Agreement with the Soviet Union while it was still under the French Mandate. In some respects, the Soviet Union supported and fought for the Syrian independence and conversely Syria recognized the Soviet Union as a close power. In 1952, two years before the Egyptian crisis when Nasser received arms supplies from the Soviet Union, Syria received military support from the Eastern bloc. Contrary to the Egyptian events, the Soviet support was not ensued by a massive wave of protests. During the summer of 1957 - summer of madness (Philip Anderson, 1995) -, the Soviet Union became deeply involved in the Syrian affairs and threatened the United States and its allies to launch a third World War if they attacked Syria. In return, Syrian politicians agreed that the Soviet Union held a "special" position vis-a-vis Syria (Khaled al-Azm, 1965). My communication will analyze the Syrian perspective in order to understand how and why some Syrian politicians started to request the Soviet Union help, what it meant for them, and what types of strategies they adopted to become closer to the Soviet Union, and therefore, how the Soviet Union strategy interacted with local elites. Neo-institutionalism may be used in order to determine the nature of the relations between the two countries. More generally, they provide some insights of more general application to the study of the dynamics of the interplay between the “Third World” and the superpowers. The Soviet assistance to Syria and its impact on the national political scene have to be reconsidered. Writing on this issue has just began and has to be clearly defined. Four dimensions interacted: political agreements, the economic and technical support, arm supplies, and cultural relations. Each of them needs to be explored in itself and then to be connected with each other in order to understand how the Soviet foreign policies were launched toward Syria and how Syrian politicians played with these different tools.