Soviet and Post-Soviet Foreign Policies I E-Book

Robert M. Cutler

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 301

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

This collection of studies investigates the political economy of international relations between the Soviet bloc (the “East”) and the developing world (the “South”), spanning the entire post-Stalin era while focusing on the 1970s and 1980s. The works examine East-South relations from the standpoints of international trade patterns, financial transfers, military relations including their economic angle, interactions within the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and the international legal framework for trade embedded in the “socialist offensive in international law.” The chapters provide extensive bibliographies making this volume a handbook of great interest not only to researchers, but also to university students and the general public.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

ForF.L.

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Foreword Four Decades of Soviet Policy in the Developing World

1 Snapshot of Soviet Foreign Trade with the Third World in the Mid-1970s

2 East–South Relations at UNCTAD Global Political Economy and the CMEA

3 Economic Issues in East–South Relations

4 The Political Economy of East–South Military Transfers

5 East–South Relations in Global Perspective

List of Abbreviations

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

CMEA Council of Mutual Economic Assistance

CP Communist Party

EEC European Economic Community

G77 Group of Seventy-seven

GATT General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade

GDR German Democratic Republic

GSP Generalized System of Preferences

IBEC International Bank for Economic Cooperation

IBRD International Bank for Reconstruction and Development

IIB International Investment Bank

ILC International Law Commission

IMF International Monetary Fund

ITO International Trade Organization

LDC less-developed country

MFN most-favored nation

MPLA People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NIC newly industrializing country

NIEO New International Economic Order

OPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries

RBP restrictive business practice

SIPRI Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

TIC tripartite industrial cooperation

UNCITRAL United Nations Commission on International Trade Law

UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade and Development

USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

WEFA Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates

WTO Warsaw Treaty Organization

Acknowledgments

I thank Andreas Umland for his encouragement and Valerie Lange, Jana Dävers, and the staff of Ibidem Verlag for their assistance. The Acknowledgments below incorporate acknowledgments in any previously published works. I have converted any original bibliographic footnotes into inline citations with Lists of References at the end of each chapter. Substantive footnotes have been incorporated into the texts proper. About one-third of the material in this volume has never been published before. Brief details follow here.

Foreword. I thank Roger E. Kanet for his generosity of time and effort in framing and introducing these works, as well as for his patience in awaiting publication.

Chapter 1. The chapter “Snapshot of Soviet Foreign Trade with the Third World in Late 1970s” compiles extracts on East–South trade from the chapter, “Trade, Aid, and International Relations,” which I co-authored with Paul E. Lydolph in his Geography of the USSR: Topical Analysis, 2nd ed. (Elkhart Lake, Wisc.: Misty Valley Publishing, 1979), 479–510. The publisher was wholly owned by Professor Lydolph. I have made every possible effort in good faith to locate his widow, children, or other relatives, but without success. I would ask them to contact me if they see this notice, so that appropriate arrangements may be made.

Chapter 2. The chapter “East–South Relations at UNCTAD: Global Political Economy and the CMEA” was first published as an article under the same title in International Organization 37, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 121–142. I thank MIT Press for permission to reprint the article. The research could not have been executed without support from the FERIS Foundation of America, sponsor of the Albert Gallatin Fellowship in International Affairs, Graduate Institute of International Studies (now Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies), Geneva. Members of the Institute’s faculty who kindly shared their expertise and time are too numerous to mention. I must thank Urs Luterbacher and his colleagues for their hospitality, which greatly facilitated all my work. Harish Kapur and Marlis Steinert helped to shape this study’s broad contours within their Working Group on EEC–Third World relations, where an early version was presented. Their suggestions greatly aided its revision. Comments by the editor of International Organization led me to reformulate some important points, which Catherine Mannick helped to clarify. A multitude of international civil servants and national representatives at the United Nations in Geneva accorded me confidential interviews. About 10 percent of this chapter is previously unpublished, integrating material from the original seminar paper, excluded for reasons of concision of argument from the published text.

Chapter 3. The chapter “Economic Issues in East–South Relations” was first published as an article under the same title in Problems of Communism 33, no. 4 (July–August 1984): 73–80. This academic journal is a US Government document and therefore, as I have confirmed, no permission for reprinting is required. I nevertheless wish now to thank David E. Albright, its erstwhile editor, for facilitating the original publication. About 10 percent of this chapter is new material that integrates passages from an unpublished draft, excluded for reasons of concision from the published text.

Chapter 4. The chapter “The Political Economy of East–South Military Transfers” was first published as an article under the same title in International Studies Quarterly 31, no. 3 (September 1987): 273–299. I thank the International Studies Association for permission to reprint the article in this volume. I was principal co-author with Laure Després and Aaron Karp, whom I thank for their agreement that it is republished here. The research could not have been executed without the support of the Scientific Research Council (University of Nantes), the National Center for Scientific Research (Paris), the Economic and Social Science Council (London), and the Swedish Council for Research in Social and Human Sciences (Stockholm); as well as the assistance International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and also Robert Tartarin, Thomas Ohlson, and Michael Brzoska. A preliminary version was presented to the Research Committee on the Evolving International Economic Order at the Thirteenth World Congress of the International Political Science Association (Paris, July 1985). About 30 percent of this chapter is previously unpublished, integrating passages from that paper which were excluded for reasons of length from the published text.

Chapter 5. The chapter “East–South Relations in Global Perspective” is a revision of an unpublished paper of the same title, presented to the Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Northeast Political Science Association (Philadelphia, November 1989). It is published here for the first time.

ForewordFour Decades of Soviet Policy in the Developing World

Roger E. Kanet

The Soviet Union was one of two global superpowers for nearly a half-century until its final implosion at the end of 1991. Its competition with the United States for power and influence led to its engagement around the world with nearly all other states. Initially, the Soviet Union and the United States faced one another across what Winston Churchill called the Iron Curtain in Central Europe. Soon, however, the emergence of a host of new states from the decolonization of West European empires in Asia and Africa created new platforms for competition between the superpowers (Namikas 2016). The USSR and the United States inevitably expanded their competition to the Third World, where each viewed it in zero-sum terms.

This Foreword provides the historical context required for an adequate understanding of the place and importance of Robert Cutler’s work on the economic and military instruments behind Soviet-bloc influence in the Third World. I thank him for encouraging me to cite liberally from my own work, which he considers to be characterized by the general evolution of such studies over the decades concerned.

1 Emergence of Soviet Policy in the Developing World

Prior to Stalin’s death in 1953, the USSR had virtually no direct relations what later would be termed the developing world (Kanet 1974), except for various links established through relations with Communist Parties of “the East,” such as the Communist Party of India and the Chinese Communist Party. Both of these were established in the first half of the 1920s and members of the Communist International. There were relatively few independent states, in areas of what came to known as the Third World, with which to have state-to-state relations. The priorities of the Soviet Union and of the other states concerned anyway lay mainly elsewhere.

From the mid-1950s through the early 1980s, however, the Soviet Union, and Soviet bloc more broadly, established significant political, economic, and military relations with the new states that emerged from the West European colonial system. This new direction of Soviet foreign policy in the Third World represented perhaps the most significant global expansion of U.S.–Soviet competition. Across the West, specialists in Soviet foreign policy sought to make sense of those developments and to determine their implications. After the Arab oil embargo in 1973–74, international economic relations took on a higher profile on the general world political agenda, and so also on the research agendas of international-relations researchers. The smaller East European members of the Soviet bloc increased their exposure to world markets. Likewise, in the early 1970s, the Non-Aligned Movement began its push for the normative policy it called the New International Economic Order, couched in terms of a “North–South” divide or dialogue.

However, the “North–South” concept failed to distinguish between East and West; indeed, the Soviet bloc denied any responsibility for the economic difficulties of Third World countries, attributing them to inheritances from the old colonial system. “North” meant, in fact, the West. However, observers and analysts of the communist systems, noting the growing economic and trade profile of the smaller Soviet-bloc countries, as well as the USSR, in the Third World, found it natural to begin to distinguish, investigate, and write about “East–South” relations.

Among the important academic members of the group studying this phenomenon, starting at the end of the 1970s, was Robert M. Cutler. His “East–South Relations at UNCTAD” (chapter 2, below) was the first double-blind peer-reviewed article on East–South relations to appear in a major English-language, mainstream political-science journal. Much of his analysis of East–South relations during the 1980s focused on the economic relationship between the USSR and Third World states. Always putting contemporary events into historical context, he sought to assess the expansion of the USSR’s global role and influence by focusing on the economic aspects of Soviet-bloc relations with the developing countries.

The study of “East–South relations” started to attract scholarly attention in the late 1970s. It explicitly put economic, financial, and commercial relations on an equal footing with military relations and the ideological issues. It sought to go beyond the analytical framework of bilateral Soviet foreign relations that typified “Soviet–Third World” studies up until then. Studies in that framework had focused exclusively on the Soviet Union, ignoring the foreign relations of other communist countries (and their distinctive aspects), and predominantly on the military and ideological aspects of the relationship (although often including Soviet foreign aid). Cutler’s chapter 1 below, “Snapshot of Soviet Foreign Trade with the Third World in the Late 1970s,” is a comprehensive and balanced treatment of the emergence and development of Soviet economic relations with Third World countries and their place in overall Soviet policy from their beginnings under Khrushchev through the late 1970s.

By the mid-1960s, Western colonial empires had collapsed, and many anti-Western regimes had taken root throughout Asia and Africa (Kanet 1981). Yet the USSR’s new friends and allies in the Third World were generally among the weakest and most institutionally challenged states in the world. Initially the Soviets focused on Africa.

By the end of the 1960s they had extended this interest to the Middle East, especially including the Israeli–Arab conflict. Military and political support was a central and growing element of Soviet policy in this region, as Cutler makes evident in chapter 4, “The Political Economy of East–South Military Transfers,” which still remains one of the best and most comprehensive article-length treatments of its subject. Cutler discusses quite extensively in several chapters here (previously mentioned chapters 2 and 4, and also chapter 5 “East–South Relations in Global Perspective”) how the Soviets were extensively involved throughout the entire Third World by the beginning of the 1970s. Moreover, they had developed an entire theoretical apparatus, based on categories of “creative Marxism-Leninism,” for analyzing developments there. This apparatus was wedded to an evolving ideology about how they played into the assumed eventual success of communism on the international level (Kanet 1972).

Indeed, by the early 1970s, the mainstream Soviet view (Inozemtsev 1972) was that the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (“Helsinki Conference,” 1972–1975) would confirm the shift of the European balance toward the Soviets. What they called the “changing international correlation of forces” would lead to a transition: the “socialist world-system” would predominate over the “capitalist world-system” on the global level, eventually overcoming and replacing it. Throughout the 1970s, the USSR and the Soviet bloc (including Cuba) provided substantial support to selected Third World governments and political movements. Economic and military assistance was the primary vehicle for establishing and maintaining such relations (Kanet 1989). Chapters 2 and 4 in this volume give extensive treatment to this topic. By the 1980s, however, internal Soviet weaknesses vitiated the Soviet leadership’s confidence, leading them even to question the USSR’s superpower status. The overcommitment of Soviet resources to support allies and clients across the entire globe was coming home to roost.

The final years of the Soviet system witnessed attempts by the leadership to reform the very structures of the Soviet state. These began with economic reform, but soon expanded to encompass the entire political system. The state’s foreign and security policy framework was inevitably implicated in this attempted transformation. The Soviet leadership initiated fundamental changes in foreign policy. These changes included dramatically scaling back the global confrontation with the United States and reducing Soviet military and political involvement in regional conflicts around the world. Not only did all Soviet efforts at domestic reform fail; their unintended consequence was, moreover, to bring down the entire economic and political structure undergirding the extended Soviet-bloc system from Central Europe to the Chinese border.

The 1970s were arguably the high-point of Soviet and Soviet-bloc involvement with the developing world. (See chapter 1.) As noted above, during that decade the Soviets were extremely optimistic about the prospects for increasing their influence in the international system. Their policy instruments were principally economic and military support for the ruling regimes in the South. The U.S.–Soviet détente of the early and mid-1970s gave the Soviets the opportunity to take advantage of Third World conflicts. In Angola, Ethiopia, and Southeast Asia, for example, they helped favorable regimes consolidate power. (For detailed exposition from which the following is drawn, see Kanet 1989.) Soviet preoccupations with NATO and with China, nevertheless, ranked Europe and Asia higher in absolute importance for Soviet security. The USSR made major efforts to reduce its conflicts with the United States, partly to diminish American responses to Soviet involvement in the Third World. The Soviet Union’s influence in the developing world during the decade benefited, in the end, as much from the incoherence of Western policy in Asia and Africa as from its own strength there.

By the early 1980s, despite their optimism and the good reasons for it, the Soviets found themselves increasingly on the defensive internationally. Détente with the United States had collapsed under the weight of Soviet adventurism in Africa and military intervention in Afghanistan. The USSR confronted new embargoes, higher American and Japanese military spending, and NATO’s decision to deploy intermediate range nuclear weapons in Europe. Moreover, the Soviets discovered that the political appeal of their socio-economic policies had weakened significantly: they were now losing what they called the “ideological struggle.”

2 From Retrenchment to Collapse of the Soviet State

After assuming political leadership in Moscow in spring 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev publicly described the problems facing the Soviet Union, calling for a reorientation of domestic and foreign policy. His main argument consisted of three points. First, the economic problems faced by the Soviets, including their growing technology gap with the West, augured poorly for the future. Second, economic reform (perestroika, meaning “restructuring”) within the state-socialist framework was essential to overcome these problems and provide a foundation for future economic growth. Third, a more open political system, based on glasnostʹ (openness/transparency) and demokratizatsiia (democratization), was necessary to overcome entrenched political interests and to carry through the required reforms.

The rate of Soviet economic growth had been declining. In Gorbachev’s (1987) words, economic growth had “fallen to a level close to economic stagnation.” His primary economic advisor, Abel Aganbegyan (1988), even argued that overall economic growth had actually ceased. Overall, Brezhnev’s successors confronted a situation filled with contradictions and challenges. The USSR remained a global superpower, but could use its military capabilities for political gains only with difficulty. Gorbachev’s proposals were therefore, in part, based also on his concern about the future position and role of the USSR in the international system. He called for “new political thinking” to reform Soviet foreign policy.

That initiative complemented the increasing Soviet pessimism over developments in the global South. It soon led to important changes in actual policy and to a remarkable improvement in relations with the U.S. and the West in general, with Japan and China, and with the less radical developing countries. Gorbachev recognized that the Soviets, by the middle of the 1980s, had effectively been frozen out of influence in many key situations of global significance. His new policy in Europe, Asia, and the Third World was based on recognizing that the expansion of Soviet military power had not brought comparable political gains. This retrenchment of Soviet foreign policy did not signify, however, the abandonment of gains already made or the renunciation of the goal of expanding Soviet influence in the future.

Early in the Gorbachev era, “new political thinking” comprised three main policy elements (Kanet with Katner 1992). First was a rejection of the rigidity and aggressiveness of the Brezhnev years, complemented by an effort at revitalization by reducing the role of ideology in foreign policy making. Second was the addition of “global problems” to the Soviet foreign policy agenda, signifying that capitalists were no longer to be blamed for every injustice and that communists could cooperate with them to ameliorate the human condition. Third was the recognition that the existence of nuclear weapons made international security mutual in nature.

By 1986 Moscow’s decision to reduce commitments to Third World states was evident. Besides reacting to the growing cost of supporting allies, some Soviet analysts questioned the long-term viability of some of their allies. Gorbachev (1987 173–4, 187) himself argued “that regional conflicts in Asia, Africa and Latin America are spawned by the colonial past, new social processes, or reoccurrences of predating policy, or by all three.” The goal was to find political solutions to these problems. Moreover, every country had the right to its own solutions and neither superpower should intervene in these conflicts.

For three decades the Soviets optimistically expanded their involvement in Asia and Africa. The 1980s represented a period of reassessment and retrenchment in Soviet policy toward the global South even before the Soviet state began to collapse. They did remain, however, politically, economically, and militarily active in developments across Asia, Africa and Latin America. By the mid-1980s it was clear even to the Soviet leadership that their involvement in the Third World was costing more and more, and that their increasingly scarce resources were ever more strained. One American study of the cost of the Soviet empire—including growing subsidies to Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Vietnam—estimated it at between $35 and $46 billion per year by 1980 (Machowski and Schultz 1987).

Soviet views were changing. (See Valkenier 1983, reviewed below in chapter 3, “Economic Issues in East–South Relations”; also Valkenier 1987.) Official statements no longer focused on imminent progress by “radical” states or on the “invincible” nature of the supposed alliance between the USSR and national liberation movements. Prominent Soviet analysts (for example, Bovin 1984) began openly to question the optimism of the 1970s concerning likely developments in the Third World. (For comprehensive treatments of changes in Soviet views of Third World developments, see: Hough 1986; Papp 1985.)

Challenges to Soviet hegemony had emerged even in Eastern Europe by the beginning of the 1980s. Most important was the challenge to the orthodox communist regime in Poland. When Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died in 1982, Moscow was significantly involved in the developing world. Yet a reassessment of that policy had already begun. Many governments that the Soviets supported faced serious challenges and required continued Soviet support, not least Afghanistan. The Soviets had been instrumental in the 1979 coup in Afghanistan, for example, but they were soon involved in supporting the new government against internal military challengers. The costs of Soviet commitments to Third World clients were beginning to drain the Soviet economy itself. Soviet international-affairs experts in Moscow understood that the USSR’s early successes in the Third World states did not create stable political and economic systems in those countries.

At the very same time, in the early 1980s, relations with the United States were continuing to deteriorate. The Reagan Administration, which came to power in January 1981, viewed Soviet behavior as an aggressive challenge to U.S. interests in the developing world and undertook a more assertive policy than its predecessor. By the time Brezhnev died in November 1982, the Soviet role in the developing world had greatly expanded in comparison with three decades earlier; yet its power and influence remained limited. The immediate post-Brezhnev leadership, first with Yuri Andropov (November 1982–February 1984) and then Konstantin Chernenko (February 1984–March 1985) at the head, still did not make any major policy shifts in that policy; if anything, it even increased its involvement in the Third World. It was only with the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev after Chernenko’s death that the policy changes noted earlier were introduced,

Thus, by the end of the 1980s and shortly before the demise of the USSR itself, “new thinking,” as it applied to policy toward the developing world implied the demilitarization of regional conflicts and the search for political solutions to them; the removal of ideology from interstate relations; and restraint from interference in the domestic politics of other states. The impact of this “new thinking” for Soviet policy in the Third World became evident when the Soviets began to withdraw their military forces from Afghanistan in 1988, reduced their troops in Angola and pushed for a ceasefire there in 1989, and announced in 1991 their intention to reduce their role in the civil war in Ethiopia. In other words, in the years and months leading up to the implosion of the Soviet Union in the fall of 1991 the government in Moscow was disengaging from many of its policies in the Third World, and elsewhere, that it had pursued for the previous four decades. Yet, consensus on foreign policy broke down as many in the party and state apparatus opposed the changes in both domestic and foreign policy being implemented by Gorbachev and his supporters.

Before December 1991 it had become evident that future Soviet policy toward the developing world (and the rest of the world more broadly) was unclear. Overall, any future Soviet commitments to revolutionary Third World movements would not be as extensive as they had been, but that support for existing Leninist regimes (e.g., Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ethiopia) would continue, perhaps on a reduced level.

3 Conclusion: East–South Relations in the Later Cold War

This Foreword has discussed East–South relations in the years leading up to the end of the Cold War, in order to set the stage for Robert Cutler’s works published here. His analyses of Soviet and Soviet-bloc policy, focusing on economic factors of trade and aid, along with military assistance, hold up very well more than 30 years after they were first executed. Some of the items are expanded from their original publication, with the addition of previously unpublished material. The last chapter has never been published before.

Cutler’s works here provide an important historical assessment of an extremely significant aspect of Soviet foreign policy and Soviet-bloc international relations in the last decades of the USSR’s existence. They are of continuing value, and much of the analysis that they contain remains authoritative today, not only on their own merits but also for perspective and insight as the Soviet Union’s major successor state, the Russian Federation, attempts to extend its role in global affairs.

References

AGANBEGYAN, Abel. 1988. The Economic Challenge of Perestroika. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

BOVIN, Aleksandr. 1984. “The Difficult Roads of Freedom.” Izvestiia, 12 November, p. 5. Translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press 36, no. 48 (26 December 1984): 48.

GORBACHEV, Mikhail. 1987. Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World. New York: Harper and Row.

HOUGH, Jerry. 1986. The Struggle for the Third World: Soviet Debates American Options. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

INOZEMTSEV, N. N. 1972. “Les relations internationales en Europe dans les années 1970.” In Europe 1980: The Future of Intra-European Relations; Reports presented at the Conference of Directors and Representatives of European Institutes of International Relations, 121–136. Foreword by Jacques Freymond. Collection de Relations Internationales 1. Leiden: Sijthoff; Geneva: Institut Universitaire de Hautes Études Internationales, 1972.

KANET, Roger E. 1972. “Changing Soviet Attitudes Toward the Developing Countries.” In On the Road to Communism: Essays on Soviet Domestic and Foreign Politics, edited by Roger E. Kanet and Ivan Volgyes, 142–157. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

—. 1974. “The Soviet Union and the Colonial Question, 1917–1953.” In The Soviet Union and the Developing Nations, edited by Roger E. Kanet, 1–26. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

—. 1981. “Patterns of Eastern European Economic Involvement in the Third World.” In Eastern Europe and the Third World, edited by Michael Radu, 303–322. New York: Praeger Publishers.

—. 1989. “The Evolution of Soviet Policy toward the Developing World: From Stalin to Brezhnev.” In The Limits of Soviet Power in the Developing World, 36–61, edited by Edward A. Kolodziej and Roger E. Kanet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

—, with Garth T. KATNER. 1992. “From New Thinking to The Fragmentation of Consensus in Foreign Policy: Soviet Policy in the Third World.” In Soviet Foreign Policy in Transition, edited by Roger E. Kanet, Deborah Nutter Miner, and Tamara J. Resler, 121–144. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

MACHOWSKI, Heinrich, and Siegfried SCHULTZ. 1987. “Soviet Economic Policy in the Third World.” In The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Developing States, edited by Roger E. Kanet, 117–140. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

NAMIKAS, Lisa. 2016. Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo, 1960–1965. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

PAPP, Daniel S. 1985. Soviet Perceptions of the Developing World in the 1980s: The Ideological Basis. Lexington: Lexington Books.

VALKENIER, Elizabeth Kridl. 1983. The Soviet Union and the Third World: An Economic Bind. New York: Praeger Publishers.

—. 1987. “Revolutionary Change in the Third World: Recent Soviet Reassessments.” In The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Third World, edited by Roger E. Kanet, 23–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roger E. Kanet is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at both the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (since 1997) and the University of Miami (since 2019) after 53 years of university teaching, research, and administration. He holds both a Ph.D. (1966) and an A.M. (1965) in Politics from Princeton University, an M.A. in International Relations from Lehigh University (1963), an A.B. from Xavier University (1961), and a Ph.B. from Berchmanskolleg in Pullach-bei-München, Germany (1960). He began his teaching career at the University of Kansas, where he was also Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Chair in the Political Science Department. He spent almost a quarter-century (1973–97) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he was Director of Graduate Studies, Head of the Political Science Department, and later Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. At the University of Miami (1997–2019), he was first Dean of the School of International Studies, then Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of International Studies, and finally Professor of Political Science. Earlier in his career, he held post-doctoral fellowships at Columbia University, the University of Warsaw, and the Bundesinstitut für ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Studien (Cologne). He has published more than 240 scholarly articles and book chapters and has edited and contributed to 35 books, primarily on topics of Soviet and Russian foreign policy. The most recent of these are The Routledge Handbook of Russian Security (2019) and, with Dina Moulioukova, Russia and the World in the Putin Era: From Theory to Reality in Russian Global Strategy (Routledge, 2021).

1 Snapshot of Soviet Foreign Trade with the Third World in the Mid-1970s

The Soviet Union’s trade with the Third World expanded significantly in the early and mid-1970s. Outside the communist world, its economic aid has been very small but its military aid has often been the most productive of its goals. The Soviets have helped with projects that Western countries did not aid due to political reasons. In both trade and aid, they have mainly emphasized countries in Asia and north Africa, in a belt extending from the western Mediterranean to the borders of China. Asia and north Africa received 80 percent of Soviet aid from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America have received relatively very little attention.

Keywords: Soviet, trade, aid, developing, Third World, Africa, Asia

Soviet trade is in the midst of a period of expansion, under the aegis of détente and peaceful coexistence. Soviet leaders seem to have decided to attempt to increase the country’s rate of industrial growth by importing huge amounts of advanced Western technology, while at the same time providing its citizens with incentives to work more effectively by importing Western consumer goods. The value of Soviet trade during the five years 1971–75 was 87 percent above its level during the five years 1966–70. Trade turnover increased more than 28 percent from 1974 to 1975 and more than 12 percent from 1975 to 1976. Some of this increase in value can naturally be attributed to general global inflation, which had particular affected petroleum products and gold, the two main Soviet exports to hard-currency countries. Even in terms of fixed prices, however, Soviet trade turnover in 1975 was 232 percent that of 1965.

In spite of this recent rapid increase, Soviet trade is still well below what one might expect of an economy the size of that of the Soviet Union. In 1975 the USSR ranked seventh globally in total trade turnover, but was nowhere near a leading trading country on a per capita basis. (See Table 1–1.) It has been estimated that Soviet trade would be about 3.5 times its current size if it had a market economy. It remains to be seen whether the current rise in trade volume is another crash effort to catch up technologically with the West, followed by a diminution of trade, or whether it marks the start of a Soviet program to maintain foreign exchanges at a level commensurate with the size of the country’s economy.

Table 1–1. Foreign trade of leading countries, 1975.

Country

Imports (million current USD)

Exports (million current USD)

Total turnover (million current USD)

Trade turnover per capita (current USD)

United States

102,984

106,157

209,141

979

Fed. Rep. of Germany

74,208

90,021

164,229

2,656

Japan

57,881

55,844

113,725

1,025

France

54,247

52,214

106,461

2,017

United Kingdom

53,262

43,760

97,022

1,734

Italy

38,366

34,821

73,187

1,311

U.S.S.R.

36,969

33,310

70,279

276

Netherlands

34,573

35,075

69,648

5,101

Canada

34,306

31,881

66,187

2,899

Source: Compiled from data in United Nations, 1976 Statistical Yearbook (New York: United Nations, 1977).

1.1 Recent Changes in the Structure of Trade

Significant changes in the structure of Soviet trade have occurred during the postwar period, particularly during the last decade of rapid growth. The number of trading partners has greatly increased, and the proportions of trade among primary trading partners have shifted. Commodities have also shifted in relative importance, and the Soviets have begun to import more than they export, particularly from hard currency developed and developing countries. To cover their debts, the Soviets have been extended long-term credits by those countries.

By 1976 Soviet trade had grown to 56.8 billion rubles, with 117 countries, of which 55.6 percent with other socialist countries and 50.8 percent was with other members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA): Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Mongolia, Poland, and Romania. Almost a third of Soviet trade was conducted with industrialized capitalist countries, and 11.5 percent with developing countries. (See Table 1–2.) During the last decade, Soviet trade has grown most rapidly with the United States, Japan, and West European partners, at the expense of trade with other communist countries and with less developed countries (LDCs).

Table 1–2. Soviet Trade Turnover by Principal Countries, 1976.

Millions of Rubles

Percent of Total

TOTAL

56,755

100.0

Socialist Countries

31,552

55.6

German Dem. Rep.

5,997

10.6

Poland

5,235

9.2

Czechoslovakia

4,543

8.0

Bulgaria

4,466

7.9

Hungary

3,492

6.2

Cuba

2,872

5.1

Yugoslavia

1,821

3.3

Romania

1,600

2.9

Mongolia

615

1.1

China

314

0.6

North Korea

301

0.5

Vietnam

296

0.5

Indust. Capitalist Countries

18,658

32.9

Fed. Rep. of Germany

3,009

5.3

United States

2,205

3.9

Japan

2,121

3.7

Finland

1,979

3.5

Italy

1,778

3.1

France

1,697

3.0

Great Britain

1,233

2.2

Other (19 countries)

4,636

8.2

Developing Countries

6,545

11.5

Iraq

715

1.3

India

648

1.1

Egypt

531

0.9

Brazil

446

0.8

Iran

445

0.8

Syria

235

0.4

Algeria

190

0.3

Other (69 countries)

3,335

5.9

Source: Computed from Ministerstvo vneshnei torgovli, Vneshniaia torgovlia SSSR v 1976 g. [USSR Foreign Trade in 1976] (Moscow: Statistika, 1977).

Soviet trade with most countries of the world has continued to increase slowly in absolute terms. Between 1965 and 1976, the fraction of total Soviet trade with the Industrialized West increased from 19 percent to 31 percent, while that conducted with Eastern Europe fell from 57 percent to 48 percent. Soviet trade with the developing world fell from 12 percent to 11.5 percent over the period, after having increased to 15 percent in 1973 and 1974. The two Germanys have emerged as the largest Soviet trading partners, each within its respective bloc.

Although the Soviets have had some success in selling manufactured goods on the world market, they have had a hard time finding ready markets in industrialized countries for what usually have been inferior consumer products. Consequently, the 1970s have seen an expansion of the export of fuels, electricity, ores, and metals, as prices for these items have skyrocketed. In recent years there has been renewed emphasis on an export profile that maximizes raw materials at the expense of consumer goods, while the portion of industrial goods remains essentially constant. In 1976 fuels, electric power, ores, and metals accounted for 49.5 percent of Soviet exports; wood and paper goods and raw materials of animal origin accounted for 8.5 percent; machinery and equipment accounted for 19.4 percent; and consumer goods accounted for 6 percent. Other types of exports accounted for the remaining 16.6 percent.

Soviet exports to the developing countries since 1960 have emphasized machinery and equipment—although not to the degree evident during the 1930s—and consumer goods, which now constitute their highest portion of total imports ever. In 1976 the composition of Soviet imports was: machinery and equipment, 36.3 percent; consumer goods, 35.4 percent; metals, ores, and fuels, 14.7 percent; wood and paper products and raw materials of animal origin, 4.1 percent; and other goods, 9.5 percent.

The structure and quantity of Soviet trade are determined by Soviet planners’ priorities for bolstering the domestic economy. On the one hand, they are looking for advanced technology to improve their industrial productivity; on the other hand, they are looking for special types of consumer goods to satisfy the Soviet citizen. Most of the advanced technology has to be purchased from the industrialized capitalist countries, whereas consumer goods are purchased wherever they may be, often being taken in exchange as payment for Soviet aid projects in developing countries. In years of poor harvests, the Soviet Union has had to go to the West to purchase grain. This has become a continuing import item, and the Soviets signed in the early 1970s an agreement with the United States to purchase at least six million tons of grain per year.