I must say that Lenin foretold this whole process. Lenin, who spent most of his life in the West and not in Russia, who knew the West much better than Russia, always wrote and said that the Western capitalists would do anything to strengthen the economy of the USSR. They will compete with each other to sell us goods cheaper and sell them quicker, so that the Soviets will buy from one rather than from the other. He said: they will bring it themselves without thinking about their future. And, in a difficult moment, at a party meeting in Moscow, he said: “Comrades, don’t panic, when things go very hard for us, we will give a rope to the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie will hang itself.”

Then, Karl Radek, . . . who was a very resourceful wit, said: “Vladimir Ilyich, but where are we going to get enough rope to hang the whole bourgeoisie?” Lenin effortlessly replied: “They’ll supply us with it.”

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
June 30, 1975, in a speech to the AFL-CIO

The issue of trade has figured prominently in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union ever since the Nixon administration initiated the policy of détente almost a decade ago. Already in 1969, even before détente had become the central theme of the Nixon administration’s foreign policy, the President signed into law the Export Administration Act, replacing the Export Control Act which had been adopted two decades earlier. The new act greatly liberalized restrictions on the export of goods and technology to the Soviet Union. While continuing to prohibit exports that would “make a significant contribution to the military potential” of the Soviet Union, it lifted the ban against those that would strengthen the Soviet Union’s “economic potential.” The change grew out of pressure from American corporations anxious to do business with Moscow and fearful of losing contracts to competitors in Europe and Japan. But to President Nixon and his principal foreign-policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, the change had chiefly political, not economic, significance. They saw increased U.S.-Soviet trade as an essential component of détente.

The idea of using trade to promote détente with the Soviet Union did not originate with the Nixon administration. President Johnson too had expressed the desire to “build bridges” to the Communist world through trade. A special committee he appointed to look into the matter had concluded that trade could be “one of our most powerful tools of national policy,” since it would enable us to “influence the internal development and the external policies of European Communist societies along paths favorable to our purpose and to world peace.” Kissinger’s version of this general view was the concept of linkage, according to which increased U.S.-Soviet trade would help to establish “a web of constructive relationships” that would give the Soviet Union a stake in peace by making it “more conscious of what it would lose by a return to confrontation.” Finally, increased trade might also, in Kissinger’s words, “leaven the autarchic tendencies of the Soviet system” and eventually lead to the integration of the Soviet Union into the world economic system and thus to the gradual liberalization of Soviet society.

The Nixon administration’s eagerness to embark on this new course was evident in the terms of the trade agreement reached with Moscow on October 18, 1972. It provided both for the financing of Soviet purchases with long-term loans through the Export-Import Bank, and for a request to Congress to grant most-favored-nation tariffs for Soviet imports. Congress, however, reacting to the Yom Kippur War and the continuing harassment of Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and other Soviet dissidents, was in no mood to grant Moscow such generous terms. It added the Jackson amendment to the Trade Reform Act, making freer emigration from the Soviet Union the condition for lowering tariffs and qualifying for Export-Import Bank loans. Subsequently, Congress adopted the Stevenson amendment limiting Export-Import Bank credits to $300 million without further congressional approval. The Russians objected to these amendments—especially the credit ceiling, for they had been willing to compromise on the emigration issue—and in early 1975 canceled the whole agreement.

The issue of U.S.-Soviet trade became a point of controversy once again last summer when President Carter, in response to the trials of Soviet dissidents Anatoly Shcharansky and Aleksandr Gins-burg, blocked the sale of a Sperry-Univac computer system to the USSR and placed the export of oil and gas technology to the Soviet Union under government control. Moscow immediately charged that the President was taking a “path of confrontation,” and a U.S. Commerce Department official warned that the trade curbs would have “a substantial chilling effect on exports.” The Carter administration quickly backed off, and approved all 74 of the applications submitted for the export of oil technology to the Soviet Union. Last December, the President dispatched Commerce Secretary Juanita M. Kreps and Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal to Moscow with the message that the administration wanted more trade between the two countries and was in favor of removing some of the obstacles standing in its way—presumably the Stevenson and Jackson amendments.

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It appears, then, that another round is looming in the ongoing battle over the trade issue. Once again it is being argued that the United States, with its balance-of-payments deficit running at record levels, has a vital economic stake in trade with the Soviet Union and a vital political stake as well, since closer economic ties will promote the liberalizing tendencies inside the Soviet Union and establish a foundation for improved U.S.-Soviet relations. William Verity, the chairman of Armco Steel Corporation and co-chairman of the U.S.-USSR Trade and Economic Council, said recently that “a policy of holding trade hostage for political reasons is self-defeating.” And Averell Harriman, at a luncheon meeting of U.S. business leaders in Moscow, blamed U.S. congressional leaders for the “outrage that for all these years we cannot have normal trade relations with the second greatest nation in the world.” In Harriman’s view, which is shared by many businessmen, U.S.-Soviet trade would blossom were it not for anti-Soviet forces in this country.

And yet from a strictly economic point of view, trade with the Soviet Union hardly merits the attention that has been lavished upon it by U.S. businessmen and trade officials. In 1978, for example, the volume of trade with the USSR was $2.8 billion, an all-time high, but just over one-third the amount of trade that was carried on with Taiwan last year. One would hardly know this from comparing the sheer volume of congressional studies, books, conferences, and news articles devoted to the two subjects; and yet in a sense it is beside the point. It is not the present level of trade with the Soviet Union that excites U.S. businessmen, but the possibility of exploiting the vast, hitherto forbidden Soviet market. “Otherwise cautious executives,” Marshall I. Goldman has written, “all but trample over one another in their effort to establish a foothold on this new frontier.”¹

But how new is this frontier? When the question of trade is debated, it is frequently forgotten that there are many historical precedents for the current efforts to expand trade with the Soviet Union, and while they explain why Russia is so interested in trade, they do little to justify business’s continuing optimism.

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There was substantial Western investment in Russia during the half-century preceding the Bolshevik revolution. The coal, iron, and steel-producing region of southern Russia was developed with capital and technical assistance from British, French, and Belgian companies, and German and Dutch firms helped develop these industries in the north. The “iron king” of Russia was an Englishman, John Hughes, who built the mining and metallurgical factories of Yuzovka—named in his honor—in the Donets Basin. The Swedish Nobel brothers developed the oil fields of Baku on the shores of the Caspian Sea, which helped make Russia the world’s leading oil producer by 1901. The Trans-Siberian railway was built with Western (principally French) capital and technology, and the parallel telegraph line was built and operated by the Danes. Many American firms, too, participated in Russia’s industrial development during this period. International Harvester was the largest manufacturer of agricultural equipment in pre-war Russia and Singer Sewing Machine had holdings worth over $100 million and employed a sales force in Russia of over 27,000 people in 1914.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, all this came to an end, as the new regime expropriated all Western capital investment and financial assets. But even this unprecedented act of industrial theft did not discourage Western business interests, eager to regain access to the alluring Russian market. The opportunity came soon enough. Just three years after the revolution, with the Russian economy in a state of total wreckage, Lenin invited Western firms back to Moscow and asked them to set up concessions. In the West this new policy was welcomed as a sign of moderation and a move toward “peaceful coexistence,” but Lenin, as it turned out, had not ceased to be a Bolshevik. “Concessions—,” he told a meeting of the Soviet Communist party in 1920, “these do not mean peace with capitalism, but war on a new plane.” Lenin’s sole objective was to revive Soviet industry, and, as subsequent events revealed, he had every intention of expropriating the concessions after production had been organized and sufficient capital, equipment, and skills had been brought into the country.

Nevertheless, Western firms, oblivious to the risks involved, flocked to the Soviet Union once more, bringing with them technicians, machinery, technology, and capital. From Germany came such major companies as Krupp, Thyssens, Otto Wolff, Siemens, the AEG, Junkers, Telefunken, and I.G. Farben; from the United States, General Electric, Westinghouse, International Harvester, RCA, Alcoa, Singer, Du Pont, Ford, and Standard Oil of New York. Concessions were also established by important English, French, Swedish, Danish, and Austrian companies. All told, the government granted about 350 concessions, and their impact on the Soviet economy was extraordinary. A recent study, which analyzes in painstaking detail the impact of the concessions on each sector of the Soviet economy, concluded that by 1930 there was not a single important industrial process—from mining, oil production, metallurgy, chemicals, transportation, communications, textiles, and forestry to the production of industrial and agricultural equipment and the generation of electrical power—which did not derive from transferred Western technology.²

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If the advantages to the Soviets from all this are obvious, one is hard-pressed to identify any benefits accruing to the Western firms involved. By 1933, there were no foreign manufacturing concessions left in the Soviet Union, even though many firms had signed contracts covering periods of thirty and even fifty years. Some of the concessions were closed down by force, but the more common methods were punitive taxation, breach of contract, legal harassment, and disruptions by workers. The largest concession of all, the British mining company Lena Goldfields Ltd., had assembled its technicians, invested almost $80 million in equipment, and completed its surveys when it was attacked as a “weed in the socialist system.” The OGPU raided its units, threw out many of its personnel, and jailed several of its leading technicians on charges of “industrial espionage.”

In only a handful of special cases was compensation granted. Armand Hammer, who represented 38 large American firms in their dealings with Moscow and was a political sympathizer (his father had been a member of the steering committee that founded the U.S. Communist party in 1919), was compensated for the liquidation of his asbestos and pencil-manufacturing concessions. (Interestingly, these were also the only concessions to earn significant profits.) The Soviet authorities also agreed to compensate Averell Harriman for the liquidation of his manganese concession in Chiaturi in 1928, but only after Harriman had agreed to arrange a long-term loan for them in the United States (aimed both at demonstrating Soviet credit-worthiness and undermining official U.S. policy against such loans). Most firms were not so lucky, however, and those which had lost their holdings once before in 1917 had the dubious distinction of being expropriated twice.

Far from signaling the end of Western business involvement in the Soviet Union, the liquidation of foreign concessions marked the beginning of the most massive transfer of Western technical resources yet undertaken in the form of American assistance to the first Five-Year Plan (1928-33). The plan, still thought by many to have been a remarkable Soviet achievement, turns out to have been largely the work of American management and engineering, as Stalin acknowledged in 1944, when he told Eric Johnston, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that two-thirds of the large industrial projects in the Soviet Union had been built with American assistance.

America’s leading industrial-architecture firm, the Albert Kahn Company, was contracted to design and supervise the major units of the plan, as well as to organize Gosproektstroi, the Soviet Design Bureau. Kahn’s engineer, G.K. Scrymgeour, directed Gosproektstroi and also chaired the Building Commission of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, while various other American companies got individual contracts to build the mammoth separate projects outlined in the plan.³ Du Pont built two nitric-acid plants at Kalinin and Shostka; the Arthur G. McKee Company of Cleveland managed the construction of the steelworks at Magnitogorsk, a replica of U.S. Steel’s Gary Indiana plant and the largest steel complex in the world; Colonel Hugh Cooper, the builder of the great Wilson Dam at Muscle Shoals, supervised the construction of the even larger Dniepr Dam, for which he received the Order of the Toilers of the Red Banner. In addition, General Electric built and installed the massive generators at the Dniepr and also designed the Kharkov turbine works which had a manufacturing capacity two-and-a-half times greater than its own central plant in Schenectady. The Austin Company, builder of Ford’s River Rouge factory, constructed the great auto plant at Gorki (known as “the Detroit of Russia”), while the USSR’s other auto plants, at Moscow and Yaroslavl, were built respectively by the A.J. Brandt Company of Detroit and the Hercules Motor Corporation of Canton, Ohio. Austin’s John Calder (whom Maurice Hindus called “Russia’s miracle man” at the time) managed the construction of the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, Europe’s largest, which was first built in the United States, then dismantled and shipped to Russia, where it was put together again. For this achievement (and for salvaging the construction of another plant at Chelyabinsk after an abortive effort by a Russian team of engineers) Calder received the Order of Lenin, as did his colleague, Leon A. Swajian, who was chief engineer for the construction of an identical tractor plant at Kharkov.

In 1930, Business Week proclaimed that Russia, though unrecognized politically, had “come to the aid of depressed American industry.” American businessmen, delighted with these Russian contracts, looked forward to a period of expanding U.S.-Soviet trade. Unfortunately, the benefits that American business actually derived from this unprecedented burst of commercial activity proved to be meager and short-lived—as well as absurdly disproportionate to what the Russians gained. In 1930, U.S. exports to Russia reached the all-time high of $230 million, but it was still only a small fraction of total U.S. exports. By 1932, exports had dropped to less than $28 million, and the following year they dropped still further to $14 million. The Soviet government (which had sold grain to finance imports while millions of Russians starved) had simply run out of money.

But even after the Export-Import Bank had been set up in 1934, primarily to finance Soviet purchases, exports still did not increase significantly. The main reason for this was that Russia had by then attained a considerable degree of industrial self-sufficiency, made possible by the willingness of American companies to construct finished plants and assist in their duplication, and to transfer essential technology to the USSR. To its $30-million sale of auto parts, for example, the Ford Motor Company threw in an extra bonus in the form of an agreement to send its technicians to Gorki to introduce Ford production methods⁴ and to bring Soviet engineers to its River Rouge plant for training. (Of the 1,039 Soviet nationals arriving in the U.S. between January 1, 1929 and June 15, 1930, 81 per cent came for industrial-training programs.)

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America’s wartime alliance with the Soviet Union produced still another wave of euphoria at the prospects of trade with the USSR. In 1944, soon after his meeting with Stalin, Eric Johnston wrote in Nation’s Business that “Russia will be, if not our biggest, at least our most eager customer when the war ends.” The following year Fortune published a poll showing business leaders to be the “most friendly” toward the USSR of all American groups and also the most hopeful about postwar relations—annual exports to Russia, the magazine predicted, would be between $1 billion and $2 billion. Alas, in 1946 annual U.S. exports to Russia, though still financed by Lend-Lease credits, totalled only $236 million, and even that level would not be reached again for more than a quarter of a century.

While the export controls imposed by the U.S. in 1949 played a part in delaying a new round of Soviet purchases, they had nothing to do with the initial drop in exports after 1946. What happened to cause this drop was precisely what had happened fifteen years earlier when Russia reverted to autarchy immediately after having absorbed an enormous amount of Western technology and equipment. Under Lend-Lease, Russia had received $2.6 billion worth of nonmilitary goods from the U.S. (in addition to $8.5 billion in military hardware), including $1.25 billion of the latest American industrial equipment. Even more significant, however, was the more than $10 billion worth of industrial and military equipment dismantled in Germany and shipped to Russia in the greatest and most systematic looting of a defeated country in the history of war.⁵ From the Soviet Zone the Russians acquired several thousand plants representing 41 per cent of Germany’s 1943 industrial capacity, and still more was removed from the Western Allied zones under an agreement allocating 25 per cent of the plants there to the Russians. The booty included such plants as the famous Karl Zeiss factory at Jena which manufactured optical precision instruments, and the Opel autoworks at Brandenburg. (Small wonder that the 1947 Moskvich 401 was a replica of the 1939 Opel Kadett!) Berlin’s entire electrical-equipment industry was removed, as was two-thirds of Germany’s aircraft and rocket industry, including the enormous underground V-2 rocket plant at Nordhausen which provided the foundation for the Soviet Union’s Sputnik program.

Since specialists were needed to bring this new industrial capacity into operation and to develop it further, technicians were also shipped off to Russia. On a single night—October 22, 1946—6,000 German scientists, engineers, and aviation experts, along with 20,000 dependents, were placed on trains and transported to various points throughout the Soviet Union where German industry had been reassembled. Once again Russia had become “self-sufficient.”

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Contemporary champions of U.S.-Soviet trade⁶ view this historical background as relevant only to the extent that it helps to explain why psychological barriers to the unrestricted expansion of commercial relations with the USSR still exist in the United States. Fears based on past experience are groundless, they argue, since the Soviet Union is a vastly different country today—less oppressive, more stable, and more committed to consumerism—than it was after the devastations of World War II, not to mention during the periods of revolutionary consolidation and forced industrialization. Samuel Pisar, for example, a leading trade advocate, is confident that the American and Soviet economic systems, at one time diametric opposites, are now “actually creeping toward convergence,” a process that will accelerate if there is increased trade.⁷

But how different is the Soviet Union today? Like every other country in the world, the USSR has of course changed over the past thirty years, but nothing has happened to alter the nature of its economic relations with the West in any fundamental way. The Soviet Union’s chief priority is still the procurement from the West of advanced technology for its heavy industry (machine-building, metalworking, chemicals, and so forth). Though the new emphasis on consumer needs in the ninth Five-Year Plan (1971-75) raised hopes that the Soviet Union would enter the market for consumer goods, this emphasis was dropped when the plan was actually implemented, and the current Five-Year Plan restores producer goods to their traditional preeminence.

The continuing Soviet need for Western technology results directly from the weaknesses of its centralized, state-run, command economy. Much has been written about the inefficiencies of the Soviet economy which produces about half the American GNP using a larger workforce (and which now suffers from a labor shortage). What is not sufficiently appreciated is the degree to which the system, because of its stifling rigidity, is structurally resistant to technological innovation. This problem became acute in the 1960’s with the slowdown in the Soviet growth rate and with the realization by Soviet leaders that the country could not keep pace with the West, let alone catch up with it, if it did not obtain access to revolutionary Western innovations in computers and electronics. There is no question that the need for such access was a critical factor in the Soviet conversion to détente.

Indeed, the one change that can be detected in the pattern of Soviet trade relations with the West involves the absorption of Western technology, which no longer occurs at fitful intervals, as it did in the 30’s and 40’s, but appears, at the moment at least, to have become an uninterrupted process.

Still, the importance of this development should not be exaggerated. It is not the result of changes that have taken place inside the Soviet Union, nor is it evidence that Russia has been drawn into “the disciplines of international economic life,” as the original linkage policy had hoped. It merely means that Soviet leaders are satisfied with an economic relationship in which, according to the Soviet journal Foreign Trade (1977), the USSR “efficiently uses the benefits of the international division of labor and constantly imports technically advanced plant and the latest licenses and know-how.”

And why indeed should they not be satisfied with an arrangement which virtually guarantees greater advantages to the USSR than to its Western partners? If for no other reason, the Soviet Union stands to benefit simply by virtue of its technical backwardness. During the early years of détente, for example, the Nixon administration encouraged top American firms to sign “technological-exchange” agreements with Moscow. The firms had nothing to gain technologically from such agreements, but went along with them in the hope that “exchanges” of this sort might eventually lead to large contracts. The contracts rarely materialized, but the Russians received valuable technology in the meantime. A spokesman for Control Data Corporation, which signed a ten-year agreement with the Soviet Ministry of Science and Technology that included a plan for the joint development of a new super computer, admitted not long ago that the Russians gained fifteen years in research and development by spending just $3 million over three years. And government-to-government exchange agreements, another byproduct of the early euphoria over détente, have had the same result. The Apollo-Soyuz space program, one of the better known examples, has been called by Zbigniew Brzezinski “a vehicle for the one-sided transfer from the United States to the USSR of a technology that has obvious military applications.”

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The asymmetry of the technological “exchange” relationship is reinforced by the Soviet Union’s obsession with secrecy and by its unabashedly predatory approach. While American firms are expected to be forthcoming with technical information, especially if they hope to win contracts, the Russians have been extremely reluctant to divulge information on plant operations, let alone to allow American technicians to visit the plants for which they have been asked to design systems.

At the same time, American firms have trained hundreds of Soviet technicians in the U.S., and teams of Soviet specialists—ostensibly looking into possible purchases—have been allowed to tour defense-related American plants. A member of one such group, which closely inspected the Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnell Douglas factories in 1973 and 1974, admitted privately to a Boeing official that purchases had never been contemplated—meaning, of course, that the group’s real purpose had been industrial espionage. Within the FBI, concern has been expressed that Moscow’s espionage efforts have expanded in recent years owing to the sharp increase in the number of Soviet citizens here on official business and to the treaty arrangement allowing Soviet ships to call at 40 American ports.

Still another factor that works to the USSR’s advantage is that Soviet foreign trade is a state monopoly. As the sole buyer in a situation where there are many sellers—competing American firms as well as firms from Europe and Japan—it has unequal bargaining leverage which it uses not only to bring down prices but also to secure maximum technological benefits that include the provision of technical data and licenses, extensive training of Soviet personnel, and, increasingly, long-term arrangements for the continuous supply of new technology. American firms in high-technology fields like computers, aerospace, and automotives are willing to agree to such arrangements in order to compensate for the high cost of research and development. But the end results favor the Russians, as exemplified in the Soviet purchase not too long ago of space suits for $150,000 which had cost the Americans $20 million apiece to develop.

There have even been some instances where American firms have provided valuable technology in the hope of landing a major contract, only to lose the contract to a competitor. In 1973 the Raytheon Corporation, seeking direct contact with the USSR’s Ministry of Civil Aviation to promote the sale of an advanced air-traffic control system (ATC), mounted an elaborate exhibition in Moscow in cooperation with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. After Raytheon had invested $220,000 in the exhibition and presented plans for an ATC system more advanced than the one in the United States, the Russians asked for competing bids from four other American and two European companies. They also indicated in the course of the negotiations that an American bid would receive more favorable attention if it were accompanied by an offset purchase of Soviet-made YAK-40 jet aircraft, and if the U.S. granted increased landing rights to Aeroflot. In all, the U.S. companies spent over $500,000 and provided the Russians with quite a lot of valuable technical work before the contract was awarded to a Swedish-Italian consortium.

Not all the American firms dealing with Moscow have been quite so unsuccessful as Raytheon, but according to a prominent U.S. businessman quoted in a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, “Nobody is doing the business he expected.” (Even the modest U.S. export figures—$2.26 billion in 1978—overstate the amount of trade carried on by high-technology firms, since agricultural products account for more than 75 per cent of U.S. exports to the Soviet Union.) In addition, U.S. businessmen stationed in Moscow have had to work under extremely trying conditions: the enormous, impenetrable Soviet bureaucracy; the bugging of their offices, conference rooms, and private residences by what the Journal report called “the omnipresent official eavesdroppers”; the fear for their personal safety, as pointed up by the arrest last June of International Harvester’s F. Jay Crawford.

Still, it is all worth it in the opinion of Harold B. Scott, the former president of the U.S.-USSR Trade and Economic Council, for the Soviet Union “will one day be the largest market in the world. The systems put in place there now will determine the patterns of trade. Now is the time when it is crucially important to put our technology there.”

With all due respect to Mr. Scott, it is hard to believe that this perpetually alluring Russian market really exists, or if it does exist, that it will one day be ours, especially if we continue to “put our technology there,” as he urges. Why should such a market come into being when by selling whole factories (called “turnkey” plants) and training Soviet personnel, we help Russia produce by itself what it might otherwise have to buy from us or from other Western countries? Ironically enough, the way trade has been conducted with the Soviet Union not only does not discourage those autarchic tendencies Kissinger was talking about, but actually reinforces them, even as Soviet purchases of Western technology continue.

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Many businessmen claim that the chief obstacle to more U.S.-Soviet trade is the Jackson amendment tying lower tariffs to freer emigration. But even if the USSR were granted most-favored-nation tariffs, Soviet exports to the U.S. would still not increase significantly (which means that its ability to import American goods would also not increase by very much). Even now, the great bulk of Soviet exports consists of raw materials and semi-manufactured goods which are not subject to discriminatory tariffs. The only exports which would be affected if the Jackson amendment were withdrawn are manufactured goods, and there just is not very much of a market in the U.S. for Soviet products.

The congressional limitation on Export-Import Bank credits is far more important in this connection since the Soviet Union simply does not have the hard currency to finance its purchases. The amendment limiting credits, adopted in 1974 in the climate of growing disillusionment with détente, resulted in the U.S. government’s withdrawal from a reckless economic venture, the financing of the huge Soviet-bloc debt. This debt was about $8 billion at the end of 1970. By the end of 1975, it had mushroomed to $38 billion, according to an estimate by the Chase Manhattan Bank, and by 1976, it had increased still further to $48 billion. Today it has reached $55 billion and is still growing. At a ministerial meeting of the OECD in June 1976, Henry Kissinger described the debt surge as “sudden” and “striking” and went on to raise questions about its economic and political implications. Kissinger also voiced concern that the debtor countries had acquired substantial leverage over the creditor countries through the latter’s fear of default.

The Soviet Union’s lack of hard currency has led to another practice which also skews the trade relationship in its favor. This is the so-called compensation agreement whereby a Western firm builds a plant in a Communist country and supplies equipment and know-how in return for part of the plant’s eventual output. Once again, the advantages of this arrangement to the Soviet Union and its satellites are considerable. They not only increase their production with Western financing and advanced machinery and technology, but are also given access to Western markets in the course of “repayment”—and all this without spending any hard currency. The advantages to Western firms are cheap, strike-free labor (which, however, means a loss of jobs in the West) and access to untapped sources of raw materials. At the same time, however, they risk substantial losses if the market is glutted at the time of repayment, which is what happened to Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum, for instance, in its $20-billion fertilizer deal with the USSR.

Furthermore, they have no protection against repayment in substandard products, or against market disruption if the Communists, seeking hard currency or market penetration, choose to dump goods in the West. Fiat, for example, had no idea that it was creating a trade rival when it built the Volga Auto Plant at Togliatti (since it was assumed that Soviet domestic needs would easily absorb the plant’s production). But the Fiat-like Lada is being sold right now in Europe and Canada at well below the cost of production. Similarly, unions throughout Europe’s depressed chemical industry have expressed alarm that the products of the massive petrochemical plants to be built with Western support at Tomsk and Tobolsk will one day flood the European market.

In addition to the problems of market disruption and job displacement, Western firms run the added risk—always present when dealing with Communist countries—that political relations may deteriorate before compensation has been received. In some agreements the payback period is twenty years, a longer time than “détente” (by any prudent estimate) can be expected to hold up. If the Russians, for whatever reasons, should decide to cancel the compensation agreement at any time during that period, it will not do a Western firm much good to know that its collateral consists of oil pipelines buried beneath the Siberian steppes, or industrial machinery installed in Tobolsk. The knowledge that their investments have made them hostages to political circumstances could well turn Western businessmen into fervent defenders of appeasement.

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Among votaries of U.S.-Soviet trade, however, the idea that political relations might deteriorate even in the face of expanded trade is virtually ruled out, since it is taken as axiomatic that trade will strengthen the liberalizing, peaceful tendencies in the Soviet Union. This is an old notion. In 1922, British Prime Minister Lloyd George said that trade “will bring an end to the ferocity, the rapine, and the crudity of Bolshevism surer than any other method.” In our own time it is widely believed that trade, in Daniel Yergin’s words, “draws the Soviet Union into the community of advanced industrial nations.” From this point of view, of course, trade with the Soviet Union is valuable even if it does entail certain economic disadvantages. But is there any evidence so far of this happy outcome?

The view that trade will lead to liberalization in Russia is partly based on the not illogical belief that exposure to the West will encourage the development of Western norms and values in the USSR. Unfortunately, the present Soviet leaders, like the Czars before them, are as mindful of this possibility as anyone else, which is why they take great care to shut out Western cultural influences even while helping themselves to Western products and technology. To realize how far the Soviet authorities are willing to go to prevent any contacts from taking place outside of very tightly controlled official channels, one need only think of the confiscation of follow-up cards passed out at a seminar in Moscow conducted by Singer personnel, or the removal of subscription forms from all copies of Aviation Week and Space Technology distributed at the Raytheon exhibition, or the totally self-contained office, hotel, and apartment complex for foreigners that is being constructed in Moscow—the modern equivalent of the Nyemetskaya Sloboda, or “foreigners’ quarter” (literally, “German Quarter”) built by Vassily III almost 500 years ago.

But the Soviet regime not only isolates Westerners, it also tightens internal controls to prevent Western influences from seeping through. Particularly during periods of détente—the last decade is a good example—there seems to be an increased tendency for the regime to step up repression and ideological vigilance. All of this would seem to suggest that trade does not promote liberalization, and may actually have the opposite effect.

The fact, too, that trade is used as a way to obtain the technology needed for rapid modernization means, in the context of a command economy, that it is frequently associated with forced industrialization and the use of slave labor. The program of Westernization under Peter the Great was achieved at the cost of immense sacrifice and suffering imposed on the Russian people. Two centuries later, Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, which marked another period of intense absorption of Western technology, took an even greater toll in freedom and human life.⁸

The argument is also made—again to show the link between trade and freedom—that the Soviet Union must liberalize its system in order to solve its economic problems, and that increased exposure to our superior economic methods will encourage Soviet leaders to take this course. This argument might be valid if the Soviet leaders were interested in nothing more than promoting economic efficiency and technological innovation. But they also have a stake in maintaining their totalitarian system, a system which is inherently inefficient and uncreative. If this fundamental contradiction were allowed to work itself out, it might conceivably lead to real reforms inside Russia, but Soviet leaders have been able to avoid the choice between reform and stagnation precisely by turning to the West for totalitarianism’s “missing dynamic.” (It is instructive to recall that Brezhnev’s decision to import Western technology on a large scale followed a brief but politically costly experiment in the 60’s with economic decentralization.)

Thus trade, by injecting into the Communist system the technological innovations without which it could not survive but which it cannot achieve on its own, actually helps to sustain totalitarianism.

The strategic as well as the moral implications of this fact have thus far been ignored. The idea that trade promotes East-West peace, central to the thinking of those who shaped the policy of détente, remains basically unchallenged among U.S. policy-makers today, despite evidence that the increase in trade since 1970 has not been accompanied by reduced Soviet military spending or greater moderation in the Middle East, Africa, or elsewhere. In fact, increased trade (or, more specifically, the increased pace of technology transfers) has been accompanied by the continuing build-up of Soviet military forces and by a greater Soviet readiness to intervene in local conflicts.

Pre-revolutionary Russian history offers numerous examples of the rulers of Russia importing technology from the West to strengthen their country’s military capacity. And far from ending the practice of importing Western technology for military use, the Bolshevik rulers have simply recast it into revolutionary terms. Occasionally these acquisitions have been accomplished by theft—as in the case of the atomic espionage of the 40’s—but more often the same result has been achieved through political and trade agreements, in accordance with Lenin’s famous statement that the capitalists “will supply us with the materials and technology which . . . we need for our future victorious attacks upon our suppliers.”

In the 20’s Germany was the main foreign source of military assistance. Thereafter, the United States took over, becoming the main supplier of military-related technology, along with Germany and Britain, until the cold war. Fertilizer plants supplied by the West were used to produce explosives, machine plants turned out gun barrels, and—most important—the automotive industry which had been set up by U.S. firms produced tanks and armored trucks.⁹ For years after World War II, Lend-Lease transfers and the dismantling of German industry were providing the Soviet Union with the foundation for military production.

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This process is still going on today. Indeed, there is now a growing concern in the United States that the technology we have already supplied to the Soviet Union, particularly in the computer field, has contributed to Soviet advances in strategic weaponry and strengthened the USSR’s overall economic and military capability. The president of Texas Instruments, J. Fred Bucy, who chaired the Defense Science Board Task Force on the Export of U.S. Technology, told a Senate panel in 1977 that “the transfer of militarily significant technology has been of major proportions,” and that the full consequences of this development “will become evident over the next five years.”

Presumably the U.S. government approves only technology transfers which have no military significance, but the problem is that most modern technologies have both civilian and military uses. The air-traffic control system, for example, can also be used for air defense and vectoring fighter aircraft; the semiconductor technology used in computers has numerous military applications, including missile-guidance systems; technology for the manufacture of wide-body aircraft and high-bypass turbo-fan jet engines can be used in the production of military aircraft. And while precision ball bearings certainly have many industrial uses, they are also essential for the production of the guidance mechanism in MIRV warheads.

The problem is further complicated by the fact that the technologies of greatest interest to the Soviet Union are first developed by the private sector in the U.S. for commercial use, and are only later adapted to military programs. As Bucy pointed out, this means that “increased pressures for commercial trade with the USSR and its Comecon partners may result in the flow of significant technologies before similar technologies are applied to advanced weapon systems in the U.S.”

To add to the problem, many Soviet factories have both civilian and military lines of production. It would be most surprising, for example, if the Western-built Kama River truck factory, which is slated to be the largest industrial complex in the world, did not produce military vehicles upon its completion, in addition to diesel trucks and engines. This has been standard procedure in Soviet motor plants for some time, and, given the regime’s obsessive secrecy—which is not, after all, a psychological aberration but has a rational purpose—it will be impossible to verify whether or not the Kama plant is producing for the military. Indeed, when one considers for a moment that military production is the first priority of the centralized Soviet economy, and that it is the sector in which the best available technological and human resources are concentrated, the notion that imported Western technology will not be used for military purposes seems rather farfetched.

Nor need this technology be directly used by the military in order for it to be “militarily significant.” Even if applied to industry, it serves the purpose of freeing scarce research talent for military work. It seems perfectly obvious that if foreign technology relieves the labor shortage by modernizing Soviet industry, it makes it easier for Moscow to maintain a standing army of 4 million men. And if this modernization is financed with Western credits, it reduces the burden of a military budget that now consumes somewhere between 11 and 15 per cent of the Soviet GNP.

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An example of how technological transfers to Russia of great strategic importance can take place with the approval of the U.S. government is provided by the recent controversial sale by Dresser Industries of a $144-million turnkey plant for the manufacture of deep-well drilling equipment. This particular deep-well technology is needed by the Soviet Union if it is to develop major new oil reserves, an urgent priority since it is now expected to become a net importer of oil by the mid-1980’s. Lacking adequate energy sources, the Soviet economy’s growth rate could slow to about 3 per cent, which would make it exceedingly difficult for Moscow to continue to increase military spending by 4 to 5 per cent every year, or to finance Cuban expeditions to Africa. Hence the Soviet interest in American oil technology.

Nevertheless, last summer, only weeks after President Carter announced that the government would assume control over all sales of oil technology and equipment to the Soviet Union, the administration approved the Dresser sale. Its reasoning, summed up by the Washington Post in an approving editorial, was that “the technology is widely available” outside the U.S., and that in view of the energy shortage “it serves American interests to get the maximum number of explorers into operation as soon as possible.”

The administration appears to have given no consideration at all to the strategic significance of this sale, which greatly enhances the USSR’s oil-production capabilities by giving it the capacity to manufacture premium rock-drill bits equal to the entire U.S. output, and greater than the Soviet Union’s anticipated deep-well drilling requirements for the 1980’s!

In the controversy surrounding the sale, attention was focused on only two items of the manufacturing equipment which were thought to have possible military application. These two items were subsequently approved by the Defense Department, despite expert opinion which held that one of them could produce armor-piercing projectiles. Senator Jackson, chairman of the Senate subcommittee which investigated the sale, cited pressure by both the Commerce Department and Dresser Industries as a factor that “may have contributed to what appears to have been a less than thorough assessment of national-security questions.”

Following protests by Energy Secretary Schlesinger and members of the National Security Council, approval of the sale was suspended pending a review by a special task force of the Defense Science Board. The task-force report concluded that the deep-well technology in question “has strong strategic value in its application to Soviet energy needs of the 1980’s” and that it is “wholly concentrated in the U.S.,” thus giving this country effective control over its export to the Soviet Union. The report also pointed out that the transfer of this technology to the Soviets would allow them “to enter world markets with advanced drilling capabilities,” thereby enabling them to increase their presence and influence in the Middle East and other oil-producing areas of the world. On the question of the two supporting technologies which the Defense Department had previously approved, the report concluded that both would contribute significantly to the Soviet Union’s military potential.

Despite these warnings, the President approved the Dresser sale a second time. Subsequently, he told a news conference that the administration takes adequate precautions “to be sure that we are not deliberately or inadvertently giving to [Communist] countries a means by which their military capability would be greatly escalated. This would be contrary to the existing law.”

But what exactly did the President mean when he used the words “greatly escalated” here? The ambiguity of the formulation cannot be attributed only to the informal conditions prevailing at a news conference. It also serves to point up the fact that the United States does not at present have an effective or even coherent policy governing the export through commercial trade of strategic technology to the Soviet Union. The agency authorized to control commercial exports affecting national security is the Commerce Department, and since this department is interested primarily in promoting trade and reducing the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit, these considerations play a great part in influencing judgments on what is “militarily significant.”

But the fundamental reason for the absence of a sound policy in this area is political. As long as it is assumed that trade promotes peace, no matter what is being traded, the problem of the flow of strategic technology to our principal adversary is not likely to be given serious consideration.

The argument heard most often—that controls cannot work since other nations will export what we embargo—is a rationalization for having no policy at all. In the Dresser case, for instance, there was no foreign producer the Russians could have turned to if we had denied the sale, but we approved it nonetheless. It is hard to see how the U.S. can expect to gain the cooperation of its allies in denying strategic technology to the Soviet Union if we ourselves continue to supply it in abundance. In fact, the relaxation of U.S. controls over the last decade is a major reason for the diminishing effectiveness of CoCom, the international body established in 1950 to regulate the export of strategic items to Communist nations.¹⁰

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Only a rigorous control policy can be expected to shore up the faltering CoCom arrangement and win broad support in the U.S. The objective of such a policy need not be to restrict trade with the Soviet Union, but only to shut off the flow of strategic technology in accordance with the Defense Science Board’s crucial distinction between products and technology—that is, between the item produced and the know-how required to produce it.

This distinction did not matter so much thirty years ago, when the U.S. and its CoCom allies first attempted to work out a control policy for trading with the Soviet Union. At that time a favorite Soviet method of acquiring technology was to copy Western prototypes which had been procured through single-item purchases. But as technology became more complex and the pace of technological change increased, this kind of “reverse engineering” became less feasible—by the time a process had been mastered and brought to production the product would have become obsolete. So the Russians naturally dropped their interest in individual products, and turned instead to the direct acquisition of critical technologies and production capability.

Control policies, however, have been oblivious to these changes and are still focused on the regulation of product transfers, so that items of secondary importance to the Soviet Union are now regulated while the U.S. and other Western countries actually encourage the transfer of what the Russians want most. We now have a policy, in other words, which allows Western firms to build whole production facilities in the Soviet Union, transfer vital manufacturing information, and train Soviet personnel, while withholding one particular item in the sale because it is on the CoCom list of embargoed goods. Small wonder that our allies are cynical about it.

It seems clear that this must change. While controls on selected critical products should be maintained, policy must be revised to take account of the central importance of technology transfers which contribute in any way at all to the Soviet Union’s military and industrial strength. To be sure, in a world where technology is widely diffused, a policy aimed at denying the Soviet Union access to such technologies cannot be airtight. But as Fred Charles Iklé, the former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, has observed, “gradual seepage is one thing. It is quite another matter to expedite the spillage of some of the most advanced and complex technologies.” And even if Soviet acquisition of such technologies cannot be prevented, it can at least be delayed, which may serve to maintain and perhaps extend what is called “the strategic lead time” of the United States over the Soviet Union. Our present lead in strategic technologies, estimated at three to ten years, is smaller than it was before “détente,” but it is still a factor that restores some stability to the growing imbalance between U.S. and Soviet military forces.

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Despite the current avidity for trade, it should be possible to win at least a measure of business support for a policy of stricter controls on technology transfers to the Soviet Union. In his new book, A Time for Truth, former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon traces the history of U.S. business aid to the Soviet Union by way of demonstrating the economic superiority of capitalism over Communism. But except in a footnoted afterthought in which he calls the whole enterprise “desperately unwise,” Simon never comes to grips with the basic question of who stands to benefit most from current U.S.-Soviet trade ventures. Lenin put it rather succinctly in his famous question, “kto kogo?” (“Who [will defeat] whom?”), and perhaps it is time this question was asked by more than a small handful of business leaders. Capitalism is indeed more efficient than Communism, but if this very efficiency is used to sustain and fortify the enemies of free society, does this not, in the words of Seymour Martin Lipset, constitute “the ultimate failure of capitalism”?

But business need not even bother about such ultimate conclusions in order to support a policy of controls on the transfer of technology to the Soviet Union—it need only recognize its own economic self-interest. The transfer of production capability will dry up markets and create competitors far sooner than it will enhance trade or profits. All it takes is one firm—poorly managed, perhaps, and needing a Soviet deal to balance its books—to transfer the technology of an entire industry; surely this consideration should provide sufficient incentive for business to demand an effective policy of controls. Then, too, there is the question of the competitive disadvantage individual firms now face in negotiating with the Soviet state trading monopoly. Should not businessmen see the need for a central clearing house for U.S.Soviet trade to offset this disadvantage?

A policy of control on technology transfers differs significantly from the so-called policy of “economic diplomacy” which has stirred up so much pointless controversy in recent months. The former would shut off technology transfers to the Soviet Union while the latter would offer technology as an incentive to moderation and deny it as punishment for hostile acts. But “economic diplomacy” is no substitute for a policy of military deterrence, and common sense should dictate that anything the Russians might want badly enough to forgo opportunities for expansion is probably something they should not have in the first place. A policy of controls, on the other hand, would not be tied to politics, but for reasons that should already be clear, it could in the long run limit the Soviet Union’s ability to threaten the security of the West.

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The denial of foreign technology might very well succeed—where the present policy has failed—in bringing about a greater degree of decentralization and liberalization within the Soviet Union, but such a policy should not be aimed at changing the Soviet system. Nor should controls be loosened in response to favorable Soviet gestures on human rights. Technology is too valuable to be turned into a pawn in a game which the Soviet Union could easily manipulate in its favor. (This criticism, incidentally, does not bear upon the Jackson amendment, which in any case does not offer technology in exchange for freer emigration but only a modest amount of hard currency in the form of credits and lower tariffs on Soviet imports. There is nothing wrong with buying people’s freedom, which is what the Jackson amendment amounts to. On the contrary, it is an objective worthy of a democratic society.)

It is difficult to speculate on future trends inside the Soviet Union and more difficult to influence them from the outside. If we have learned anything at this late date in our relations with the USSR it is that interaction with the West does not necessarily yield helpful results, and that the rich creations of a free system become distorted when absorbed by a system that is not free. Those who wish to build bridges to the East through trade might recall that Brezhnev, on the eve of détente, observed that “scientific-technical progress has now become one of the main bridgeheads of the historical struggle of the two systems.”

It would be ironic if the one system able to generate such progress lost the struggle because it lacked the wisdom to understand its advantage and the will to protect it.

Carl Gershman, whose article, “The World According to Andrew Young” (August 1978), attracted widespread attention, is executive director of Social Democrats, USA.