Reaching Outside Europe
Moscow, while shopping for more ships, peddling more gold, and making other moves in the industrial countries of Western Europe, also reached outside Europe and tried to fasten closer economic ties with Asia and Latin America. The trade of the Soviet Union with the non-Communist areas of Asia, and with Latin America, has never amounted to more than driblets. That of Czechoslovakia and Poland has been a little bigger. The U.S.S.R. entered this field in 1953 with a good deal of propaganda effect. The effect in delivery of goods was still to be seen.
The Soviet trade bosses used a number of devices.
One device was to offer loans and technical assistance. Some of the loans were connected with trade. Others, related to construction activities within free-world countries, were more suggestive of investments and provided opportunity for increased Soviet or Communist Party economic penetration. There was a marked interest in assisting in the establishment of storage and supply facilities. So far, few Soviet offers have been accepted. Possibly this is because they are disturbingly reminiscent of the penetration techniques that were used to gain economic leverage inside the Eastern European countries and China prior to Soviet political domination of these regions. Or it may be that skepticism has been aroused by the experience with Communist Party use of commercial enterprises in some Western European countries to finance the local party and the Kremlin’s activities.
Another device has been to build lavish exhibits at “trade fairs.” This activity, though carried on in Western Europe too, was especially marked in South Asia. On an increasing scale, since 1951, the Soviet Union and its satellites have been using trade fairs for a double purpose—to promote the kind of trade the bloc desires and to propagate Communist ideas.
By elaborate and costly displays the Soviet-bloc governments seek to dominate the fairs; to overshadow the exhibits of the United States and other free-world countries; and to create the illusion of an industrial and commercial superiority over the Western nations, especially the United States. The U.S.S.R. makes a concerted and determined effort to discredit and minimize the industrial and technological achievements of the United States by contrasting the great size of the Communist nations’ participation with the usually modest representation by United States firms. An important distinction between Soviet and U.S. exhibits is that the former are developed as a state trade promotion and propaganda undertaking, and involve the building of special pavilions, whereas U.S. participation amounts to the sum total of exhibits of individual U.S. industrial and commercial companies assembled for the single purpose of promoting the sale of individual products.
The importance which the bloc attaches to these undertakings is found not only in the mountains of propaganda it issues on the subject, but in the sizeable expenditures it makes. For example, in 1952 the U.S.S.R. and its satellites dominated the Bombay International Industries Fair with four big exhibits. The Soviet exhibit was the largest; it cost more than $200,000 and was manned by a staff of 40. Communist China’s exhibit was the second most pretentious, with Czechoslovakia and Hungary also participating in an impressive way. At the Thailand Constitution Fair at Bangkok in December 1953, the Soviet exhibit was again the most elaborate. The Soviet Government established a special pavilion that cost an estimated $500,000 and housed 5,000 items, including trucks, automobiles, precision equipment, glassware, rugs, and preserved foods.
Yet another device was to join hands with a key nation of each continent in a brand-new impressive trade agreement which seemed to offer attractive benefits to that nation and which might stimulate neighboring countries to hanker after similar opportunities. The Kremlin chose India and Argentina. The U.S.S.R. concluded trade agreements with those two countries for the first time. So did some of the European satellites, and other satellites renewed existing agreements. The U.S.S.R. and the satellites also renewed existing agreements with certain other countries in Asia and Latin America.
The two-year Russian trade agreement with Argentina, signed in August 1953, was one of the most interesting of the year. For one thing it came at a time when trading missions of the U.S.S.R. and its satellites were becoming more active throughout Latin America—and the Soviet-Argentina agreement helped those missions to gain a somewhat more receptive audience for their overtures. Latin American governments have cooperated with other Western nations in withholding highly strategic commodities from the Soviet bloc; for example, bloc proposals to buy Chilean copper and Bolivian antimony and lead were not accepted. Obviously the Kremlin hoped to bring about more resistance to the control of strategic materials and to create Western disunity over that issue.
This trade agreement between the U.S.S.R. and Argentina was also interesting for its size and composition, at least on paper. It called for deliveries of $60 million in each direction, presumably during the first year, with an additional Soviet credit of $30 million. Argentine shipments were to include wool, hides, linseed oil, meat, and other goods that the Soviet Union could undoubtedly use. But the list of Soviet exports included some items for which the Soviet bloc seemed to have equal or greater need. The U.S.S.R. promised to deliver a large quantity of machinery and transportation equipment on credit, as well as petroleum, coal, and other items. Proposals to deliver certain kinds of machinery also cropped up in Soviet agreements with India and Iran.
Machinery, as we know, is what the Soviet rulers go to extreme pains to import. If they were serious now about exporting it, and if they really intended to deliver large quantities and not mere tokens, it would be something new, although even then they would probably not be exporting the advanced types which they usually seek to obtain in the West. It remained to be seen whether the U.S.S.R. would come anywhere near to complete fulfillment of the trade agreement with Argentina, for example. But one could only suspect that the promises of big and attractive deliveries—whether fulfilled or not—were made in large part for the purpose of weakening the ties of those countries with the rest of the free world.
In this chapter we have traced various threads of the Soviet trading activities, and have suggested reasons why they engaged in each kind of activity.
Now it is necessary to look more deeply into the whole complex of Soviet foreign trade policy and sum up what’s behind it all.
[CHAPTER IV]
What’s Behind It All
From the Kremlin comes a continual flow of propaganda, spread to the ends of the earth by the international Communist movement, to the effect that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is the Champion of Peace.
Stalin’s death afforded the Communists a convenient opportunity to portray a new regime zealous for a peaceful, normal world. They did not say out loud that Stalin had been less zealous, but they were not reluctant to play upon the world’s fervent wish that the new management would turn over a bright new leaf. And they were willing, even eager, for the world to believe that one part of the pursuit of peace was the promotion of East-West trade.