Читать книгу East-West Trade Trends - United States. Foreign Operations Administration - Страница 8

Table of Contents

The Kremlin, while coldly managing the East-West trade of its domain in the manner described, always had its propagandists and fellow travelers out beating the drums and making a continual outcry against the security trade controls of the West. The main line of the propaganda was that trade was equivalent to peace and prosperity, and that the Soviet bloc always stood ready for unlimited trade, but that the Western “economic blockade” barred the way. In each country the businessmen were constantly handed the false but inflammatory story that they were being shamefully discriminated against by their government and that the businessmen of neighboring countries were less subject to restrictions. Western Europe as a whole was treated to an alluring picture of a vast prospect of East-West trade, beyond all factual probability in view of Soviet policies.

This propaganda cannot be separated from the Soviet trading objectives. It is merely one of the instruments used in trying to achieve those objectives. It was used lavishly at a Moscow Economic Conference in April 1952, but although some Western businessmen who attended that meeting were impressed, the chief result was not an expansion of trade or elimination of Soviet discriminatory practices, but only the formation of new propaganda councils. And one of the significant facts of the present situation is that, although some new economic factors have arisen, the main propaganda line stays the same. At the Berlin four-power conference in late January 1954, Molotov used it again.

The truth is that Western controls, which did not become effective until the 1950’s, have never been an “economic blockade.” The controls apply to a small percentage of the types of goods which made up East-West trade in the prewar years or in 1948. They leave room for the expansion of trade in many items. There are even many kinds of industrial raw materials and products which have never been embargoed by the Western Governments. Western security controls were not primarily responsible for the low levels of East-West trade.

The main causes were Soviet policies, which wrenched the customary trade of the satellites away from Western Europe, tying it to the U.S.S.R., and which forced industrialization upon the whole European bloc in a manner which reduced its ability to trade with the West. In addition to these basic causes, the bloc countries were unsatisfactory trading partners in many ways. The prices were often higher than the world market; the deliveries were uncertain and sometimes deliberately withheld; the quality of their goods was often inferior; and some of the countries had a regrettable—and perhaps intentional—tendency to go into debt to the West.