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Capitalism's Fellow Traveler: The Soviet Union, Bretton Woods, and the Cold War, 1944–1958

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2014

Oscar Sanchez-Sibony
Oscar Sanchez-Sibony*
Affiliation:
University of Macau
*
osanchez@umac.mo
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Abstract

This paper is a reinterpretation of the origins of the Cold War from a novel point of view: Soviet foreign economic policy. It questions two fundamental concepts that have formed the basis for our understanding of that conflict: Soviet autarky, and bipolarity. Soviet autarky has been the basis for an understanding of a “war” that, although never fought on military terms, needed two sides to be so conceptualized. Just as enemies in war can have no areas of meaningful cooperation, so did academics require of these Cold War rivals an all-encompassing enmity. To do so they came to consider the Soviet Union a camp apart, unconnected and hostile to the capitalist order. Scholars required a Soviet Union politically committed to autarky. Using archives from Moscow, however, the article argues that the Soviet Union was not autarkic by political choice and, at length, not autarkic at all. It followed a similar trajectory in international economic engagement as that of the countries in the so-called free world, and what's more, sought to do so. In other words, when one looks at the political economy of Soviet economic relations, the conceptual framework of bipolarity that sustains much of the work on the Cold War becomes difficult to maintain. Instead, I argue, an immensely powerful liberal world order acted on the Soviet Union in ways that should be familiar to scholars of global capitalism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 290 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2014 

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References

REFERENCES

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Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. New York: The Penguin Press.Google Scholar
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Narinsky, Mikhail M. 1994. New Evidence on the Soviet Rejection of the Marshall Plan, 1947: Two Reports. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center, Cold War International History Project, Working Paper 9.Google Scholar
Naumkin, Vitalii et al. , eds., 2003. Blizhnevostochnyi konflikt: Iz dokumentov arkhiva vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii. Vol. 1. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia.”Google Scholar
Nove, Alec. 1992. An Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Pechatnov, Vladimir O. 1995. The Big Three after World War II: New Documents on Soviet Thinking about Post War Relations with the United States and Great Britain. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center, Cold War International History Project, Working Paper 13.Google Scholar
Pechatnov, Vladimir O. 2010. The Soviet Union and the World, 1944–1953. In Leffler, Melvyn P. and Westad, Odd Arne, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Plokhy, Serhii M. 2010. Yalta: The Price of Peace. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Poiger, Uta G. 2000. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Reinhart, Carmen M. and Rogoff, Kenneth S.. 2009. This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, Geoffrey. 2006. Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sanchez-Sibony, Oscar. 2010. Soviet Industry in the World Spotlight: The Domestic Dilemmas of Soviet Foreign Economic Relations, 1955–1965. Europe-Asia Studies 62, 9: 1555–78.Google Scholar
Schenk, Catherine R. 1998. The Origins of the Eurodollar Market in London: 1955–1963. Explorations in Economic History 35, 2: 221–38.Google Scholar
Siegel, Katherine A. S. 1996. Loans and Legitimacy: The Evolution of Soviet-American Relations, 1919–1933. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.Google Scholar
Spaulding, Robert Mark. 1997. Osthandel and Ostpolitik: German Foreign Trade Policies in Eastern Europe from Bismarck to Adenauer. Providence: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Steil, Benn. 2013. The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Stone, Randall W. 1996. Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Treml, Vladimir G. 1983. Soviet Dependence on Foreign Trade. In NATO Economics Directorate, External Economic Relations of CMEA Countries: Their Significance and Impact in Global Perspective. Colloquium. Brussels: NATO.Google Scholar
Triffin, Robert. 1960. Gold and the Dollar Crisis: The Future of Convertibility. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of State. 1966. Foreign Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers, 1944. Vol. 4. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of State. 1967. Foreign Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers, 1945. Vol. 5. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of State. 1972. Foreign Relations of the United States. Vol. 3. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Waltz, Kenneth. 1979. Theory of International Politics. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Westad, Odd Arne. 2005. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, William Appleman. 1959. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Cleveland: World Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Wood, Robert E. 1994. From the Marshall Plan to the Third World. In Leffler, Melvyn P. and Painter, David S., eds., Origins of the Cold War: An International History. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
World Bank. 2012. World Development Indicators. At; http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/TG.VAL.TOTL.GD.ZS/countries.Google Scholar
Zhang, Shuguang. 2001. Economic Cold War: America's Embargo against China and the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949–1963. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.Google Scholar
Zubok, Vladislav and Pleshakov, Constantine. 1996. Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
GARF Fond 5446: Council of Ministers of the USSR (Sovet Ministrov SSSR) at the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii).Google Scholar
RGAE Fond 413: Ministry of Foreign Trade of the USSR (Ministerstvo vneshnei torgovli SSSR) at the Russian State Archive of the Economy (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki).Google Scholar
RGASPI Fond 84: Papers of Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan at the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi archive sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii).Google Scholar
Applebaum, Anne. 2012. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Bockman, Johanna. 2011. Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bohlen, Charles E. 1973. Witness to History, 1929–1969. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Calleo, David P. 1982. The Imperious Economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Chernow, Ron. 1990. The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Chuev, Felix. 1993. Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.Google Scholar
Cox, Michael and Kennedy-Pipe, Caroline. 2005. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy? Rethinking the Marshall Plan. Journal of Cold War Studies 7, 1: 97–134.Google Scholar
Cumings, Bruce. 2004. Time of Illusion: Post-Cold War Visions of the World. In Schrecker, Ellen, ed., Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Dohan, Michael R. 1969. Soviet Foreign Trade in the NEP Economy and Soviet Industrialization Strategy. PhD diss., MIT.Google Scholar
Eichengreen, Barry. 2008. Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Eichengreen, Barry and Kenen, Peter B.. 1994. Managing the World Economy under the Bretton Woods System: An Overview. In Kenen, Peter B., ed., Managing the World Economy: Fifty Years after Bretton Woods. Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics.Google Scholar
Ellman, Michael. 2000. The 1947 Soviet Famine and the Entitlement Approach to Famines. Cambridge Journal of Economics 24, 5: 603–30.Google Scholar
Frieden, Jeffry A. 2006. Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.Google Scholar
Gaddis, John Lewis. 1987. The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gaddis, John Lewis. 1997. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gorlizki, Yoram and Khlevniuk, Oleg. 2004. Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Högselius, Per. 2013. Red Gas: Russia and the Origins of European Energy Dependence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Jackson, Ian. 2001. The Economic Cold War: America, Britain and East-West Trade, 1948–63. New York: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Jensen, Kenneth M., ed. 1993. Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan, and Roberts ‘Long Telegrams’ of 1946. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press.Google Scholar
Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. New York: The Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Kaldor, Mary. 1990. The Imaginary War: Understanding the East-West Conflict. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Kenwood, A. G. and Lougheed, A. L.. 1992. The Growth of the International Economy, 1820–1990: An Introductory Text. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kolko, Joyce and Kolko, Gabriel. 1972. The Limits of Power: The World and the United States Foreign Policy, 1945–1954. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Leffler, Melvyn P. 1992. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Leffler, Melvyn P. 2007. For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. New York: Hill & Wang.Google Scholar
Maier, Charles S. 2010. The World Economy and the Cold War in the Middle of the Twentieth Century. In Leffler, Melvyn P. and Westad, Odd Arne, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mee, Charles L. 1984. The Marshall Plan: The Launching of Pax Americana. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Mikoyan, Anastas Ivanovich. 1999. Tak bylo: Razmyshleniia o minuvshem. Moscow: Varius.Google Scholar
Ministry of Foreign Trade. 1967. Vneshniaia torgovlia SSSR: Statisticheskii obzor, 1918–1966. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia.”Google Scholar
Ministry of Foreign Trade. 1971, Vneshniaia torgovlia SSSR za 1970 god: Statisticheskii obzor Moscow: Izdatel'stvo “Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia.”Google Scholar
Ministry of Foreign Trade. 1982. Vneshniaia torgovlia SSSR, 1922–81: Iubileinyi statisticheskii obzor. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo financy i statistika.Google Scholar
Narinsky, Mikhail M. 1994. New Evidence on the Soviet Rejection of the Marshall Plan, 1947: Two Reports. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center, Cold War International History Project, Working Paper 9.Google Scholar
Naumkin, Vitalii et al. , eds., 2003. Blizhnevostochnyi konflikt: Iz dokumentov arkhiva vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii. Vol. 1. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia.”Google Scholar
Nove, Alec. 1992. An Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Pechatnov, Vladimir O. 1995. The Big Three after World War II: New Documents on Soviet Thinking about Post War Relations with the United States and Great Britain. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center, Cold War International History Project, Working Paper 13.Google Scholar
Pechatnov, Vladimir O. 2010. The Soviet Union and the World, 1944–1953. In Leffler, Melvyn P. and Westad, Odd Arne, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Plokhy, Serhii M. 2010. Yalta: The Price of Peace. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Poiger, Uta G. 2000. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Reinhart, Carmen M. and Rogoff, Kenneth S.. 2009. This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, Geoffrey. 2006. Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sanchez-Sibony, Oscar. 2010. Soviet Industry in the World Spotlight: The Domestic Dilemmas of Soviet Foreign Economic Relations, 1955–1965. Europe-Asia Studies 62, 9: 1555–78.Google Scholar
Schenk, Catherine R. 1998. The Origins of the Eurodollar Market in London: 1955–1963. Explorations in Economic History 35, 2: 221–38.Google Scholar
Siegel, Katherine A. S. 1996. Loans and Legitimacy: The Evolution of Soviet-American Relations, 1919–1933. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky.Google Scholar
Spaulding, Robert Mark. 1997. Osthandel and Ostpolitik: German Foreign Trade Policies in Eastern Europe from Bismarck to Adenauer. Providence: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Steil, Benn. 2013. The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Stone, Randall W. 1996. Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Treml, Vladimir G. 1983. Soviet Dependence on Foreign Trade. In NATO Economics Directorate, External Economic Relations of CMEA Countries: Their Significance and Impact in Global Perspective. Colloquium. Brussels: NATO.Google Scholar
Triffin, Robert. 1960. Gold and the Dollar Crisis: The Future of Convertibility. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of State. 1966. Foreign Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers, 1944. Vol. 4. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of State. 1967. Foreign Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers, 1945. Vol. 5. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of State. 1972. Foreign Relations of the United States. Vol. 3. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
Waltz, Kenneth. 1979. Theory of International Politics. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Westad, Odd Arne. 2005. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, William Appleman. 1959. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Cleveland: World Publishing Company.Google Scholar
Wood, Robert E. 1994. From the Marshall Plan to the Third World. In Leffler, Melvyn P. and Painter, David S., eds., Origins of the Cold War: An International History. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
World Bank. 2012. World Development Indicators. At; http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/TG.VAL.TOTL.GD.ZS/countries.Google Scholar
Zhang, Shuguang. 2001. Economic Cold War: America's Embargo against China and the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949–1963. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.Google Scholar
Zubok, Vladislav and Pleshakov, Constantine. 1996. Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar