It is not correct to maintain, as the bourgeois and the supporters of the theory of state capitalism do, that the relationship between the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was of an imperialist sort. It is not generally realised that, apart from the initial period just after the war when Moscow bled Eastern Europe, the terms of trade were actually extremely favourable to the countries of Eastern Europe. As a rule, Russia bought their products at prices higher than world market levels, and in return sold them oil and natural gas below world prices. In effect, Eastern Europe was being subsidised by the USSR – the exact opposite of an imperialist relationship.
In the period immediately after the war, it is true, the Russian bureaucracy looted Eastern Europe. They stripped whole industries and carted them off to Russia, not only from Germany and Hungary, but even from Yugoslavia. After the war, Milovan Djilas, at that time a prominent leader of the Yugoslav League of Communists, was sent to Moscow to negotiate, among other things, the return of Yugoslav rolling stock which had been shipped to Russia. In his memoirs, Djilas reproduces his conversation with A.I. Mikoyan, the Soviet minister of foreign trade:
Mikoyan received us coldly, and betrayed his impatience. Among our requests was that the Soviets deliver to us the railway wagons from their zone of occupation which they had already promised us – for many of these cars had been taken out of Yugoslavia, and the Russians could not use them because their track gauge was wider than ours.
“And how do you mean that we give them to you, under what conditions, at what price?” Mikoyan asked coldly.
I replied. “That you give them to us as gifts.”
He replied curtly, “My business is not giving gifts, but trade”. (M. Djilas, op. cit., p. 130.)
Far more than any statistics, this little incident reveals the haughty, overbearing attitude of the Moscow bureaucracy to its ‘brothers’ in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, the relationship was not at all an imperialist one, in the Marxist sense of the word. This was revealed later, when the relation was reversed.
The introduction of a regime of nationalisation and planning enabled the economies of these countries to register very high rates of growth, transforming themselves from formerly backward agricultural economies into developed modern countries. In the Soviet Union, they found a big market for their products, guaranteed against the violent swings of the world capitalist economy, and a source of cheap raw materials.
Far from exploiting Eastern Europe as an imperialist power exploits its colonies, if we exclude this period immediately after the war, the USSR actually subsidised them for decades. Living standards in the Soviet Union were generally lower than in the countries of Eastern Europe. In the period under consideration, there was a shift in the trade of the USSR away from Eastern Europe, and towards the rest of the world. In 1960, 52 per cent of its trade was with Eastern Europe. By 1979, the figure was 44 per cent – still very high.
Soviet oil was sold to Eastern Europe at this time at a discount of 17 per cent on world market prices. In the previous period, it had been even greater, but this still represented a huge advantage, especially if we bear in mind that the whole Western world was then reeling from the shock increase in oil prices following the six-day war between Israel and Egypt. This discount on oil alone represented a subsidy of $2.9 billion a year. In addition to this, the USSR paid for imports above world market prices from its Comecon partners (the East European equivalent of the European Union).
Cuba alone received a subsidy of $1 million a day from the 1960s until the collapse of the USSR. In 1978, for example, the USSR bought Cuban sugar at 40 cents a pound, when world prices were only 18 cents a pound. In 1977, Cuba bought Russian oil at $7.40 a barrel, when world prices stood at $20.50 – a discount of no less than 60 per cent! In the period 1966-78, Soviet aid to Cuba totalled $13 billion, an important amount for a small island. This included interest-free loans, in contrast to the bleeding of the third world through ‘aid’ from the West – loans with crippling rates of interest – which has led to a massive transfer of wealth from the former colonies to the wealthy imperialist countries in the last decades. One only has to compare the two cases to see the complete falsity of the description of the USSR as an ‘imperialist’ power.
Of course, this does not mean that there was no national oppression. Robespierre once made the profound remark that nobody welcomes missionaries with bayonets. The long history of the suppression of, say, Polish and Hungarian freedom by tsarist Russia meant that relations between the Soviet Union and these countries had to be handled with great sensitivity – as Lenin had always advocated in relation to Georgia and the other non-Russian peoples of the USSR. Instead, the Russian bureaucracy rode roughshod over the national aspirations of the peoples of Eastern Europe. Everywhere Moscow implanted a regime in its own image. Puppet governments were imposed, which slavishly carried out the dictates of the Kremlin. No dissidence was tolerated. The leaderships of the Communist Parties were ruthlessly purged, with show-trials modelled on the infamous pre-war Moscow trials.
Together with absolute power came paranoia. Seeing enemies in every corner, Stalin launched a bloody purge in the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe, which led directly to the split with Yugoslavia. In his struggle with Tito, Stalin staged a number of show trials against imaginary Titoists throughout Eastern Europe. It was the period of the Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia, Rajk trial in Hungary, and the Kostov trial in Bulgaria. Slánský and ten others were found guilty of “spying and sabotage” and shot. In 1963 the Prague Supreme Court squashed the verdicts. Rajk and his comrades were hanged by the regime as Gestapo agents. They were rehabilitated in 1956 due to “trumped-up charges”. Traicho Kostov was charged with sabotaging Bulgarian-Soviet trade and executed. Georgi Dimitrov, who had considered forming a bloc with Tito to create a Balkan Federation, was also probably murdered by the GPU. This stored up bitterness and resentment that finally burst through in the uprisings of 1953 and 1956.