Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T14:20:59.103Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Attack on protectionism in the Soviet Union? A comment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Jerry F. Hough
Jerry F. Hough
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and a Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.
Get access

Extract

Unlike the other countries in what we tend to call “the Soviet bloc,” the Soviet Union benefited financially from the oil crises of the 1970s, for it was a major petroleum and natural gas exporter. The oil crises also benefited the Soviet Union indirectly as a number of radical Third World oil producers acquired money to buy more Soviet arms. Moreover, the windfall increase in petroleum prices was supplemented by a similar windfall increase in the price of the other major Soviet export product, gold. The subsidies that the Soviet Union provided to Eastern Europe did not entail any sacrifice of resources that had been previously committed but required only that it forgo even greater gains. The politics underlying the Soviet decisions were the politics underlying the rapid expansion of export earnings.

Type
3. Economic Strategy inside the CMEA
Information
International Organization , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , Spring 1986 , pp. 489 - 503
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. XXVIs”ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza [23fevralia–3 marta 1981 goda], Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Politizdat, 1981), vol. 1, p. 24Google Scholar.

2. See the discussion in Hough, Jerry F., “Gorbachev's Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 64 (Fall 1985), pp. 39–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Bunce, Valerie, “The Empire Strikes Back,” International Organization 39 (Winter 1985), p. 34Google Scholar. Ost, David, “Socialist World Market as Striving for Ascent?” in Friedman, Edward, ed., Ascent and Decline in the World System (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1982), p. 246Google Scholar.

4. As two highly respected Western economists later wrote in 1924, the Soviet Union faced a real dilemma. On the one hand, the debt service was so high that “a thriving agricultural, commercial, and industrial Russia would be quite out of the question” if an effort were made to pay it. On the other hand, when the regime repudiated the debts and nationalized foreign property without compensation, it “uprooted so far as Russia was concerned the whole economic system based on private contract and by rejecting the very foundations upon which international credit and commercial intercourse among civilized nations is built, isolated Russia from the rest of the world.” The obvious solution was for Russia to recognize the legality of the debts and compensation, but for the West to accept arrangements by which they would not be paid in full. Pavlovsky, Leo and Moutton, Harold G., Russian Debts and Russian Reconstruction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1924), pp. 4–5, 55, 162, and 167Google Scholar.

5. Chubarian, A. O., V. I. Lenin i formirovanie sovetskoi vneshnei politiki (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), pp. 261–81, esp. pp. 272–73Google Scholar.

6. See the discussion in Day, Richard B., Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Economic Isolation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 73–76Google Scholar, and Pozdniakov, V. S., Gosudarstvennaia monopoliia vneshnei torgovlia v SSSR (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1969), pp. 26–35Google Scholar.

7. Lenin, V. I., “O monopolii vneshnei torgovli,” in Lenin, V. I., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Politizdat, 1978), vol. 45, pp. 220–23Google Scholar.

8. These issues are discussed in some of the essays in Neuberger, Egon and Tyson, Laura D'Andrea, eds., The Impact of International Economic Disturbances on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: Transmission and Response (Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

9. Consumer demand is not infinite, and manufacturers producing for the consumer do face the danger of losing markets and not fulfilling their plans. For this reason, an intelligent Soviet strategy would be to concentrate more on imports in the consumer sector than they have done in the past.

10. The evolution of the Soviet debates is discussed in Hough, Jerry F., The Struggle forth Third World: Soviet Debates and American Options (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1986)Google Scholar.

11. Dinkevich, A. I., “O strategii ekonomicheskogo razvitiia osvobodivshikhsia stran,” in Dinkevich, , ed., Razvivaiushchiesia strany: nakoplenie i ekonomicheskii rost (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), pp. 8, 12Google Scholar.

12. Time Magazine, 9 September 1985, p. 29.

13. ‘Tsentry sily'—doktrina i real'nost,” Rabochii klass i sovremennyi mir, no. 2 (1985), p. 80Google Scholar. Bovin also seemed to taunt Gromyko by noting that a multipolar policy also “complicates the work of the diplomats.” Ibid., p. 82.

14. Pravda, 22 November 1985.

15. Tucker, Robert W., “The Nuclear Debate,” Foreign Affairs 63 (Fall 1984), p. 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Brzezinski, Zbigniew, “The Future of Yalta,” Foreign Affairs 63 (Winter 1984–1985), pp. 279–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. Zagladin, V., “Marxism-leninism o roli rabochego klassa v mezhdunarodnykh otnosheniiakh,” Rabochii klass i sovremennyi mir, no. 4 (1964), pp. 16–17Google Scholar.