Soviet Trade with the Industrialized West

Whhile Leonid Brezhnev was still alive a Soviet planner contemplating the strength of his country's foreign trade position could have been forgiven for reaching some rather complacent conclusions. My country, he might have said, is big and self-sufficient in most natural resources, so its dependence on foreign trade is relatively small. Its imports are equivalent to roughly a tenth of national income, a percentage in line with the United States. Unlike the United States, the Soviet Union conducts more than half of its trade within the shelter of the guaranteed markets and comparatively stable prices of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA or Comecon). In trade with the West, the Soviet Union had a great piece of luck in the 1970s, thanks to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The oil on which the Soviet Union has relied for some twothirds of its hard currency exports soared in value in those years, and so the country could buy more from the West without running up the sort of hard currency debt that crippled Poland. There seemed every chance that this luck would last. Stalin had created a system for conducting foreign trade that provided shelter from potentially devastating Western competition without noticeably harming Soviet exports to the West. Soviet protectionism against the West provoked no "retaliatory" restrictions on Soviet oil deliveries to Western markets. On the contrary, the West seemed prepared