Suchergebnisse

Oscar Sanchez-Sibony reveals the origins of our current era in the dissolution of the institutions that governed the architecture of energy and finance during the Bretton Woods era. He shows how, in the second half of the 1960s, the Soviet Union sought to dismantle the compartmentalized nature of Bretton Woods in order to escape its material ostracism and pave a path to global finance and exchange that the United States had vetoed during the 1950s and 1960s. Through the construction of a set of pipelines that helped Europe's energy regime change from coal to oil and gas, the Soviet Union succeeded in developing market relations and a relationship with Western capital as durable as the pipelines themselves. He shows how a history of the development of capitalism needs to integrate the socialist world in bringing about the new form of capitalism that regiments our lives today.

AbstractIn the winter of 1968, tensions between Cuba and the Soviet Union boiled over as the Cuban leadership's mouthpiece, Granma, accused the Soviet Union of imposing oil sanctions on the island in order to subjugate it. Those accusations went on to become inscribed into the historiography of Soviet–Cuban relations. This intervention into that historiography is two-fold: on the one hand it uses recently declassified documents from the Soviet archives to show that there were no oil sanctions on Cuba, but rather a continuum of logistical and infrastructural challenges that created delays and tensions in the relations between these two socialist allies. On the other hand, the article contextualises the relationship within the capitalist institutions of exchange that in effect mediated it, finding in these not only part of the reason for the setbacks and tensions, but also a wider framework for better understanding the Soviet–Cuban economic relationship.

The article recounts the Bolsheviks' first attempt at organizing the economic life of their young project in peace time following the establishment of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. It argues that the Bolsheviks built their regime on a liberal foundation, concretely the gold standard; although this is often noted in passing, it has not been given the socio-economic weight this political decision deserves. In an attempt to establish their monetary authority within their territory—a sine qua non for the formation of state authority—and in international markets, they appealed to the legitimating institution of the gold standard. The prescriptions of that institution led to a set of policies and chronic political anxieties that structured much of the domestic and international policies of the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s. The study documents the thinking behind the monetary reform that tied the Communist project to the liberal world order as well as the international economic conjunctures that determined its small failures and eventual success. The analysis takes an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of money as a social institution, and aims to renew the historiographical debate over NEP by establishing its trajectory firmly within the international context that governed it.

Using recently declassified documents from Moscow, this article recounts Anastas Mikoyan's trip to Japan in the summer of 1961. The trip served as an inflection point in the commercial relationship between the Soviet Union and Japan—a relationship that by the end of the decade had become the most extensive between the Soviet Union and a country of the "free world." The article indicates that narratives focusing on ideologies of great-power rivalry during the Cold War tend to miss the kinds of global ideological currents that shaped many states' behavior after 1945. Mikoyan's discussions with political and business elites in Japan suggest that an ideology of economic growth increasingly underlay concepts of political governance on both sides and ultimately allowed for the kind of cooperation that characterized Soviet-Japanese relations.

AbstractThis 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.

Isolation -- Depression Stalinism -- Postwar: the Bretton Woods Cold War -- Aspiration -- Restoration: resuming the relationship with capitalism -- Maelstrom: the decolonization vortex -- Integration -- Conformity and profit: the Soviet economy under American hegemony -- Poor relations: the limits of Soviet economic dysfunction -- Conclusion: Mikoyan's legacy