Finland was, until the beginning of 1991, the last remaining developed market economy to trade with the USSR on a bilateral basis, with a clearing payment system. This trade system shared features with those prevalent among the CMEA countries. There is, however, a paradox. Within the CMEA the trade system was often – and over the years increasingly – criticized for being inefficient and, as a crucial part of the centrally managed – Soviet-type – economic system, indeed a major source of retarded development. In Finland, on the other hand, bilateral trade was – and, as we shall see, still is – regarded as a major factor in the achievement of the above-average economic growth rates that the country enjoyed in the post-Second World War period. This paradox needs to be explained.

In two earlier articles the current author has taken two of the available paths for approaching the paradox. The first one is an overview of existing analytical research on Finland's Eastern trade. Most of it dates from the 1980s or early 1990s, has also a practical interest tied to that time (‘should the bilateral trading system be/have been continued?’), takes up a number of interesting hypotheses, but yields only limited answers. This is to a great extent because company-specific information on the profitability of exporting to different markets is not available. Typically, even the companies involved would not have calculated that. The second article adopts a somewhat more exotic approach, looking at the opinions and interpretations prevalent in what can be called the ‘folklore’ of Finland's Eastern trade.