Soviet foreign trade monopoly
The term of the state Soviet foreign trade monopoly (Russian: Gosudarstvennaja monopolija vnešnej torgovli v SSSR ) stood for the unique position of state agencies of the USSR in the implementation of trade transactions with foreign countries. Established immediately after the October Revolution with protectionist objectives, the monopoly of foreign trade was also seen as indispensable for the planned economy and enshrined in Article 14h of the 1936 Constitution of the USSR .
Time of discussions 1917–1924
As early as December 10, 1917, in a memorandum on the implementation of socialist policy in the field of finance and economy , Lenin had noted the state monopoly on foreign trade as the third of his nine points on the economic policy of the dictatorship of the proletariat . In fact, by the end of the First World War , private business activity in foreign business was largely prevented; the Bolsheviks only had to let the situation continue, unlike under the Tsar. Everything was laid down in the decree of the Council of People's Commissars of April 22, 1918 “On the nationalization of foreign trade”. Foreign trade was thus subject to the general political interests of the state. In 1919 it was only one percent of its value in 1913, as a result of the Russian Civil War and the economic blockade that was only lifted by the Supreme Council of the Entente on January 16, 1920. In an ordinance "On the organization of foreign trade and the exchange of goods of the RSFSR " on June 11, 1920, the Council of People's Commissars decreed the renaming of the People's Commissariat for Trade and Industry to People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade (NKWT), which on March 17, 1921 with the ordinance The entire foreign trade planning also fell through the planning commissions after the main committee for foreign trade at the Supreme Economic Council was dissolved. Not only was there a monopoly on all foreign trade functions, it was now exercised by a single state body with one person at the helm: Leonid Krassin , 1921-23 People's Commissar for Foreign Trade and at the same time commercial agent in London .
Krassin championed the foreign trade monopoly in the spirit of Lenin, for whom it was one of the branches or command posts of the economy alongside banks, large-scale industry and transport after the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) . At the crucial moment, Trotsky was their ally, highlighting the utility of the foreign trade monopoly for the planned economy. The demand for abolition was most stubbornly upheld by the Supreme Economic Council under PA Bogdanov , but critics were also Sokolnikov , Zinoviev and Bukharin , who wanted foreign trade organized on a broader basis. Stalin initially took offense at the inadequate effectiveness of the monopoly. It is true that with an ordinance “On Foreign Trade” of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars in October 1922, concessions in the direction of the decentralization of the foreign trade functions, as far as the related events in the domestic market were concerned, were made again only one year later to give preference - the commercial agencies received a stronger weight.
During the industrialization period 1925–1929
In response to Lenin's committed work for the foreign trade monopoly, it was inevitable that after its death it acquired the character of a dogma . Established without controversy in the Soviet Union, it now had to be incorporated into contracts with foreign countries, otherwise the commercial agencies could not gain a foothold there. Only the foreign trade monopoly could hardly be brought into line with the most-favored nation clause as it appeared in trade contracts, and there could be no question of reciprocity here either. The usual attempts by foreign countries to counter the monopoly were such as the establishment of the Eastern Export Association in Germany . Nevertheless, the Soviet Union still had the advantage of monopoly profits and the avoidance of wholesale and intermediate trade.
A prerequisite for building a new industry was sufficient export to pay for imports. The first instrument was the Gostorg for the provision of goods of all kinds . But as early as 1925, the October plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party suggested the establishment of special foreign trade joint-stock companies, which soon carried out foreign trade on a monopoly basis in an area of activity assigned to them. However, it was hardly possible to reconcile domestic trade in planning with this handling of foreign trade activities and vice versa. For this reason, on November 18, 1925, the responsible offices were merged into a commissariat for foreign and domestic trade, unfortunately a failure, as the bureaucratic effort apparently increased. Nonetheless, the volume of foreign trade grew steadily in the late 1920s, with Zentrosojus (Russian: Central'nyj sojuz potrebitl'skich obščestv - Central Association of Consumers' Cooperatives) accounting for the largest share, which only required the approval of the Commissariat for Foreign Trade and in in some respects was outside the monopoly framework.
From the Great Depression to World War II 1930–1945
The bureaucratic sluggishness was remedied on February 6, 1930 by an instruction from the People's Commissariat for Foreign and Domestic Trade on the reorganization of Soviet foreign trade: the export-import joint-stock companies were soon followed by thirty Union foreign trade associations (Russian: Vsesojuznye vnešnetorgovye ob'edinenija), who were allowed to independently conduct foreign trade transactions within the USSR from 1931 on and outside the USSR from July 27, 1935 onwards. There was now a special foreign trade carrier for each product group. A separate People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade existed again from September 22, 1930, was given powers to suspend trade with certain countries, but ceded a significant part of the operational work to the foreign trade associations. Anyone who wanted to do business with Soviet trading partners now had to go to Moscow. In 1940 the "Conditions for the Execution of Orders of Soviet Organizations by Import Associations" and the Ordinance "On Conditions for the Supply of Goods for Export" were published. Purchase and delivery quotas were laid down in the export-import plan by the Gosplan together with the People's Commissariat (from 1946 Ministry) for foreign trade. The medium of publication for terms and conditions was the monthly Vnešnjaja torgovlja (Foreign trade). With its constitutional status in 1936 at the latest, the foreign trade monopoly had reached the state in which it would continue to exist for decades. But it also experienced the greatest perversion in the early 1930s: originally enforced in the thought that under the tsar food was exported while the population was starving, Stalin now squeezed the means for ambitious industrialization from the peasant people and persecuted the kulaks . The volume of foreign trade sank again to the level of 1923 by 1939. The world economic crisis and its consequences are likely to have been the main reason for the strict self-sufficiency policy under Stalin.
From bloc formation to perestroika 1946–1986
The renaming of the people's commissariats into ministries took place on March 13, 1946, in addition to the one for foreign trade, from July 1957 on, there was also the "State Committee for Economic Relations with Foreign Countries" at the Council of Ministers of the USSR . It was up to him to intensify cooperation with socialist countries and those in the Third World . This mainly concerned the export of complete plants. The Soviet Union still took part in the IMF negotiations, but soon afterwards, with the establishment of the Council for Mutual Economic Aid (Comecon), a separate sphere of power was defined. The foreign trade monopoly now acquired an additional, integrating function. A generation away from Lenin, a third of the world's population lived in countries that controlled their trade in this way. In contrast, in 1954 the Council of Europe considered a plan to demonstrate the unity of the West through its own foreign trade monopoly, with a trading company through which the exchange of goods with the Eastern bloc would be channeled. The idea was so at odds with traditional procedures that it would have been difficult to defend publicly.
Last but not least, the opportunity to improve one's own position in the development aid sector through trade was the motivation under Khrushchev to get the Soviet Union on a course out of global economic isolation - but the increase in prosperity in the interior was also important. In 1976, improved foreign trade was declared a core task of politics and Brezhnev recognized, completely abandoning the old striving for self-sufficiency, as a peculiarity of his time "the increasing use of the international division of labor for the development of every country, regardless of its wealth and economic level".
Finally, in 1986 , a phase known as “ perestroika ” began in Soviet politics , which included an overhaul of the foreign trade system that began in 1987. In order to better adapt the foreign trade monopoly to world market conditions, the "State Foreign Trade Commission of the Council of Ministers of the USSR" was founded in August 1986, and in January 1988 merged with the Ministry of Foreign Trade into a super-ministry. There was now scope for decentralized investment decisions and clearly export-oriented companies were allowed to own foreign trade companies. Tried out in the early 1920s, now more capitalist ideas and given a new name, the " Joint Venture " from 1987 was also the easier entry into cooperation across system boundaries, with a serious problem that was a peculiarity of the Soviet -Currency lag: the ruble was not convertible . The complete control of foreign trade allowed domestic prices to be decoupled from world events and an importation of inflation to be excluded, but this system was an obstacle for the calculations that were now necessary. When 40,000 companies were allowed to carry out export and import business independently in the Soviet Union in 1990, they also had the problem of having little routine when taking out loans for setting payment terms. Unlike the state-owned foreign trade bank , which was previously responsible for raising money and was considered solid, the individual combines were now classified as very sensitive borrowers.
proof
- Hubert Schneider: The Soviet foreign trade monopoly 1920-1925 , Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Cologne 1973, ISBN 3-8046-8471-8
- Jan F. Triska / Robert M. Slusser: The Theory, Law, and Policy of Soviet Treaties , Stanford University Press, Stanford 1962, pp. 324-333
- Kaspar-Dietrich Freymuth: The historical development of the organizational forms of Soviet foreign trade (1917-1961) , reports of the Eastern Europe Institute at the Free University of Berlin, Berlin 1963
- John Quigley: The Soviet Foreign Trade Monopoly. Institutions and Laws , Ohio State University Press, Columbus 1974
- Heinrich Machowski: Foreign trade . In: Hellmuth G. Bütow (Hrsg.): Country report Soviet Union , Federal Center for Political Education, Bonn 1986 (2nd updated edition 1988), pp. 431–448, ISBN 3-89331-019-3
Individual evidence
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 21
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 23
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 24
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 25
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 49
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 27
- ^ Schneider 1973: p. 17 and Quigley 1974: p. 17
- ^ Schneider 1973: p. 54
- ^ Schneider 1973: p. 175
- ↑ Quigley 1974: p. 25 and 27
- ^ Schneider 1973: p. 193
- ↑ Quigley 1974: p. 26
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 35
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 41
- ^ Schneider 1973: p. 174
- ↑ Gerald D. Feldman: The Deutsche Bank from the First World War to the Great Depression. 1914-1933. In: Lothar Gall et al: Die Deutsche Bank 1870-1995 , Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1995, p. 250
- ^ Schneider 1973: p. 198
- ↑ Quigley 1974: p. 50
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 78 f.
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 85
- ↑ Quigley 1974: 55
- ↑ Quigley 1974: p. 73
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 32
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 87
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: pp. 110-126 and Quigley 1974: pp. 103-125 u. 212-215
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 83
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 91
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 90
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 59 u. 111
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 113 and Quigley 1974: p. 92
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 96
- ↑ Quigley 1974: p. 8
- ↑ Quigley 1974: p. 61
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 147
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 129
- ↑ Freymuth 1963: p. 94
- ↑ Machowski 1988: p. 432
- ↑ Machowski 1988: p. 438
- ↑ Quigley 1974: p. 4
- ↑ a b Triska and Slusser 1962: pp. 325–326
- ↑ Machowski 1988: p. 438
- ↑ Neues Deutschland from February 25, 1976. Quoted from: Heinrich Machowski: Außenwirtschaft . In: Hellmuth G. Bütow (Ed.): Country Report Soviet Union , Bonn 1988, p. 439
- ↑ Machowski 1988: p. 434
- ↑ Machowski 1988: p. 444
- ↑ Machowski 1988: p. 432
- ↑ Interview "completely out of joint" with Friedrich Wilhelm Christians , Der Spiegel No. 21/1990, p. 125 [1]