Word: comecon
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Still fiercely nationalist, Rumania is winning its own measure of independence from Moscow. Under Soviet plans for COMECON, the faltering Communist answer to the Common Market, Rumania was supposed to concentrate on growing foodstuffs for the rest of Eastern Europe, thus stunting its own economic growth. Refusing to be a mere "garden for the Socialist countries," Party Leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej insisted on developing Rumania's own natural resources. Bucharest's feud with the Kremlin is still going strong, perhaps the first time on record that a Communist country has publicly stood up to Big Brother...
...personal letter to Kennedy, Khrushchev asked the President to realize that he, too, was up against political pressures. Meeting in Moscow, Comecon, the pallid satellite version of the West's Common Market, formally approved the test ban treaty, with Rumania somewhat belatedly in line after a brief flirtation with Peking. As for the Chinese, they denounced the treaty as nothing less than a U.S.-Russian alliance, accused Moscow of perpetrating "a dirty fraud," and of "selling out" Communists everywhere, "including the people of China." The Soviets replied in kind, called the Red Chinese "wild men" who borrow their arguments...
Since the already industrialized nations are getting the choicest assignments, they are naturally offering the least resistance, but Russia is still forced to field complaints and rebellion against COMECON policy from almost every quarter. Czechoslovakia and East Germany are reluctant to set up a common investment fund to help develop industry in member nations because they fear most of the capital will come from them. Poland, unable to get the goods it wants from COMECON neighbors, has signed treaties that will raise trade with the West by as much as 40% while it increases its COMECON purchases only 18%. Such...
...bitterest complainer on this score is Rumania, whose industrial output started from a tiny base and is growing faster than any other COMECON nation's (14.7% last year). Rumanian planners aim to keep it rising at a 12%-a-year pace until 1975, but Khrushchev's COMECON plans would condemn Rumania to mostly farming and supplying raw materials to others. Result: Rumania insists on the "right of every nation to develop and plan its economy in accordance with its own national interests." When Russia dallied in delivering a steel mill that the Rumanians had ordered (against COMECON plans...
...Best? The dispute has made a shambles of two COMECON meetings in recent weeks, and may force Moscow to call a summit meeting of party secretaries to resolve it. Even then, COMECON's efforts to assign production will face years of delay. Methods of figuring production costs vary so drastically from member to member that no one is sure who makes which product the best. "We cannot check the calculations of our partner, nor translate our calculations into language which is comprehensible to him," complains a distracted Polish economist. No more direct evidence is needed of COMECON...