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Attack on protectionism in the Soviet Union? A comment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Jerry F. Hough
Jerry F. Hough
Affiliation:
Professor of Political Science at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, and a Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.
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Extract

Unlike the other countries in what we tend to call “the Soviet bloc,” the Soviet Union benefited financially from the oil crises of the 1970s, for it was a major petroleum and natural gas exporter. The oil crises also benefited the Soviet Union indirectly as a number of radical Third World oil producers acquired money to buy more Soviet arms. Moreover, the windfall increase in petroleum prices was supplemented by a similar windfall increase in the price of the other major Soviet export product, gold. The subsidies that the Soviet Union provided to Eastern Europe did not entail any sacrifice of resources that had been previously committed but required only that it forgo even greater gains. The politics underlying the Soviet decisions were the politics underlying the rapid expansion of export earnings.

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Type
3. Economic Strategy inside the CMEA
Information
International Organization , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , Spring 1986, pp. 489 - 503
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1986

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References

1. XXVIs”ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza [23fevralia–3 marta 1981 goda], Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Politizdat, 1981), vol. 1, p. 24Google Scholar.

2. See the discussion in Hough, Jerry F., “Gorbachev's Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 64 (Fall 1985), pp. 39–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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