Challenge of coexistence : a study of Soviet economic diplomacy
- Washington Public Affairs Press 1961
- 130 p.
Just as economics are inseparable from politics, so the U.S.S.R.'s foreign political relations are inseparable from its foreign trade re lations." Implicit in this statement by Anastas Mikoyan, First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union and for almost a quarter century its top foreign economic policy maker, is the fundamental distinction between Communist and capitalist approaches to international trade-between a foreign trade operated and administered by state organs to serve the ends of a national policy, and a trade carried on predominantly by private enterprise more or less in spontaneous response to market conditions. Inseparable as it is from Soviet foreign policy, Soviet foreign trade is as much a political as an economic phenomenon: it must be viewed within a framework of hostility between East and West which admits of no facile comparison with normal Western economic relations, based as they are on a common tradition of mutual trust and confidence.
This is not to suggest that all Soviet foreign trade practice must be viewed in terms of political objectives. Within the limits of East-West trade-which Stalin maintained were politically determined "by the opposite characters of the two systems between which there is competition and conflict"-Soviet planners have often been moti vated by purely economic considerations. Certainly the commitment of the present regime to a rapid rate of economic growth in its self imposed race to "overtake and surpass" the United States, has imposed an awesome burden on capital equipment producers in the U.S.S.R. Imports of western goods and technology are a direct response to the pressures of an uneven economic development at home which can impressively send a rocket to the moon but cannot, at the same time, provide adequate quantities of chemical equipment and steel pipe, to say nothing of consumer durables. What does seem apparent, however, is the unique relationship of foreign trade to a Soviet foreign policy which posits economic competition in place of revolutionary violence as the decisive factor in the struggle between East and West.