Meat quotas came to about $22 million, with Denmark and Argentina the leading suppliers. Smaller amounts were to come from the Netherlands, Uruguay, and other countries.
Fish quotas amounted to $15 million. Nearly all of this was herring. The leading suppliers were to be Iceland and Norway, and others were the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Denmark.
The U.S.S.R. during the 7-month period also arranged to buy $7 million worth of citrus fruits from Italy, Japan, and Israel (and apparently made a whopping profit selling oranges to the Russian people); $4 million worth of cheese from Argentina and the Netherlands; $2.4 million worth of lard from Denmark and Argentina; and $1.4 million worth of sugar from the United Kingdom and Cuba.
Besides food, the most important consumer item ordered from the West was textiles. The amount is harder to estimate, but it was somewhat larger than the Soviet textile imports of any recent year. The principal suppliers were to be Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and the United Kingdom.
In addition to contracts already made, the Soviet officials were still putting out feelers for consumer goods. Some of them reached across the Atlantic. In January much publicity was given to the efforts of an American firm to buy a large quantity of Government-owned surplus butter and sell it abroad—ultimate destination Russia.
Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks announced on January 15 that he would not approve any application “which would permit an exporter to buy butter at considerably lower prices than those paid by the American housewife and then send that butter into Russia.” On February 10 he announced that it had been “decided as a matter of policy to deny commercial export license applications for the export for cash of United States Government-owned surplus agricultural or vegetable fiber products to Russia or her satellites.” He pointed out, however, that this ban “does not preclude study of export license applications for these nonstrategic products to the Soviet bloc if acquired by exporters in the open market and not from the Commodity Credit Corporation surplus stocks.”
It is difficult at this writing to compare the Soviet Union’s new commitments to buy consumer goods with the actual imports of previous years. Total free-world exports to the U.S.S.R. in 1953 are estimated at $410 million (compared with $481 million in 1952) but how much of this $410 million was consumer goods is not yet determined. The 1954 figure can only be speculated upon. But certain generalizations about consumer goods are possible.
As evident in chapter 1, the U.S.S.R. was never very much interested in importing consumer goods from the West. The items it did import for the consumer were not the household appliances and luxury items we sometimes think of as consumer goods—but were usually food. These imports have been higher at times than others: for example they were relatively high in the late 1930’s and again in 1948. Since 1950 they have been rising again, but by 1953 they were still breaking no records. They have always represented a relatively small percentage of total Soviet imports. At the same time, during the postwar years Soviet policies were forcing the consumer-goods imports of the European satellites steadily downward.
These contrasting trends of rising Soviet imports and sinking satellite imports seemed likely to continue in 1954. This probability, plus Mikoyan’s statement in his October speech that “we are helping the People’s Democracies with certain commodities,” made one wonder how much of the new Soviet imports of butter and other food were being reshipped to Eastern Germany and other satellites to alleviate the unrest there.