Their Practices Haven’t Changed
Some new tactics have been adopted, as we have seen. But even many tactics have more of an old look than a new. Soviet-bloc business practices still clash with Western concepts of normal, peaceful trade relations.
Soviet-bloc representatives have access to many free-world factories, visit docks and inspect merchandise destined for the bloc, maintain offices in commercial centers, receive technical materials from libraries and business firms, and pick up voluminous statistics on free-world resources, production, exports, and imports.
The governments of Soviet-bloc countries do not reciprocate. Although they entertain delegations of diplomats and businessmen and occasionally allow individuals to visit certain places when it serves their purposes, the Western business community in general is barricaded out of their cities, factories, and countrysides, and the peoples of the bloc firmly locked in. Disclosures of even the simplest facts and figures about their economies is a serious crime. They do not enter into the customary international agreements for the protection of patents. Though they claim to have invented almost everything, much of their industrial progress is based on piracy of Western inventions and technology, from the tiny Moskvich automobile to the jet engine. They have failed to settle promptly and adequately claims for confiscation of Western properties and for lend-lease assistance. Furthermore the terms on which they often seek to trade omit customary guarantees of fair dealing. For example, the U.S.S.R is still trying to insert clauses in its East-West contracts requiring that any dispute between the Soviet Government and the free-world businessman be arbitrated by the Chamber of Commerce of the Ministry of Foreign Trade—an organ of the Soviet Government. And as we have already seen, they make every effort to circumvent the export controls of other nations; they pay citizens of those nations to violate the laws of their governments.
The best way to characterize the Soviet “trade offensive” is that the Soviet rulers have improvised for their trade structure a new facade of papier mache but have not reconstructed the interior. In changing circumstances the Kremlin was seeking effective ways of accomplishing the same traditional objectives of feeding its industrial-military machine and weakening the free world.
In the absence of Soviet-bloc policies conducive to furnishing a long-term steady supply of exports desired by free-world countries, the West could hardly expect East-West trade to return to the prewar volume, though a short-term boost would not be surprising. The combined value of the trade in both directions between the free world and the Soviet bloc in Europe was $2.6 billion in 1951 ... $2.4 billion in 1952 ... and about $2.2 billion in 1953. By contrast, total foreign trade within the free world in 1953 was about $148 billion.
It is not only the amount of trade that must be considered, however, and that is why we have devoted attention in this report to what goods were involved and what the new Soviet regime was trying to accomplish.