Word: comecon
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...agency driving to build this unheralded rival to Western Europe's powerful six-nation Common Market is the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or COMECON. Founded eleven years ago in Moscow as a crude Stalinist device for milking the satellites for Soviet benefit, COMECON was transformed into some thing more palatable after the 1956 Polish and Hungarian risings had compelled the Russians to pour $1.5 billion in emergency aid into the satellite lands. Communist rulers of the seven satellite nations pledged their peoples' labors to help Nikita Khrushchev overtake and "bury" the capitalist West through a planned...
Soviet Russia, as the all-powerful supplier of the satellites' raw materials, calls all the COMECON tunes. All deals are bilateral, for there is no free exchange of goods in Communism's uncommon market. The Russians have refused to supply raw materials to the Rumanians to build a new truck factory, because COMECON had already designated the Poles as truckmakers...
...Russian iron ore for their new $1.5 billion steel plant rising at Kosice, the Czechs have had to sign a contract to supply the Russians with mining machinery to help boost Soviet ore production. So prickly, in fact, are the hedges between COMECON partners that in the pipeline network now being laid to carry Volga oil to East German, Czech and Hungarian factories, each country builds and owns the part within its territory. "There is no charity among Communists," says a Czech official. "Business is business...
Less Visible Chains. Because the Soviet Union alone is excused from limiting itself to certain specialties, COMECON is fast binding the satellites to greater dependence on Russia than they knew in Stalin's time. By 1965 Russia's share of Czech foreign trade will rise from a third to more than half...
...COMECON claims that all Eastern economies are growing faster than those of Western Europe. They should, because they started from so much farther back. And they still have a long way to go, though the Reds sometimes sally spectacularly at economic targets of opportunity, e.g., when Russia tries to capture Nasser's economy by offering to build the billion-dollar Aswan Dam for him. Communist-bloc imports and exports still make up less than 10% of world trade...