This book’s purpose is to show how, in the second half of the 1960s, the Soviet Union “sought to dismantle the compartmentalized nature of Bretton Woods” (i). The Bretton Woods agreement, negotiated in 1944 by forty-four countries, established the international monetary system based on fixed currency exchange rates. The Soviet Union chose not to join the agreement. Bretton Woods was abandoned in the early 1970s.

The book’s introduction discusses Bretton Woods and Soviet foreign trade, along with a variety of subjects such as a biography of a little-known Spanish economist, the origin of the input-output method, and a polemic against “triumphal narratives of the Cold War epic” (10). The body of the book then provides detailed histories of Soviet trade negotiations with the west: a prologue on the 1963 Soviet grain crisis, five chapters on individual west European countries, and a coda on Italy. These are based to a large degree on Soviet archival documents, and contain many interesting details.

Historic chapters show that the Soviets bargained hard on each trade deal, and western countries seeking Soviet business were compelled by competitive pressure to provide better terms, including the relaxation of a variety of government controls over trade and finance. The book interprets this process as (perhaps an intentional) Soviet attack on the Bretton Woods system itself, as suggested by the wording: “the main dragon Soviets strove to slay” (28), “Soviets triumphed over” Bretton Woods (16), and the already cited “sought to dismantle.”

This attack is said to have succeeded. Sanchez-Sibony notes that there is an approach in the literature that considers capital controls “central to the architecture of the regime” (28). “This book follows this understanding of Bretton Woods because the evidence points to capital controls as the main dragon the Soviets strove to slay” (28), and gaining “access to capital” “came to dismantle a system” (10). A weaker formulation states that the Soviet Union “helped dismantle the world of Bretton Woods” (9).

Two questions about these claims remain unanswered: how, and by how much. The book documents the expanding flow of credit supplied by the west to finance Soviet imports (“access to capital”), but stops short of outlining the mechanism by which this flow helped dismantle the system. Bretton Woods was dismantled by political decisions taken in response to specific economic developments, which in turn had a variety of causes, analyzed in a voluminous literature. To establish the role of east-west trade in the fall of Bretton Woods one needs to show how its expansion affected these developments. The exclusive focus on the Soviets and their western creditors precludes the discussion of how much Soviet efforts contributed to the end of Bretton Woods, compared to those of other actors, though the book mentions in passing the ongoing relaxation of capital controls in the 1960s.

Soviet external trade, in the author’s telling, was motivated by pursuit of economic growth, dictated by an ideology of “growthism” that arose “under Khrushchev in the 1950s” (8n23, 24). This represented a change from the pre-War period, when economic policy was directed towards a military buildup. There are two problems with the concept of “growthism.” First, “growthism” (also described as “productivist compulsions” [33]) is production for the sake of production, an economically faulty concept. Economic growth is a means for achieving some other objective, and “strengthening defense” remained the primary objective of Soviet economic growth throughout the 1950s and 60s. In fact, Sanchez-Sibony reviewed my book focused on these arguments (Reluctant Cold Warriors: Economists and National Security (Oxford, 2019), in Slavic Review 80, no. 1 [Spring 2021]:164). Second, growth propaganda, when “the regime often invited its subjects to exult in announcements that it had outstripped the enemy in the production of some commodity or another” (8–9), cited to illustrate the emergence of “growthism,” was as common in the 1930s as in the 1950s and 60s.

Unfortunately, occasional failures to maintain scholarly detachment mar the language of the book, as with “American… . barbarity” (n42) and “hysterical parlance that passed for common wisdom of the day” (43) in the description of the 1963 US-USSR grain deal.