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Setting Up the Rope Factory
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14709 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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11 / 1988 |
3,091 Words |
| Author
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Juliana G. Pilon
Juliana Geran Pilon is director of programs for the Americas,
Asia, and Europe at the International Foundation for Electoral
Systems. Originally from Romania, she has most recently
written The Bloody Flag—Post-Communist Nationalism in Eastern
Europe: Spotlight on Romania, published by Transaction Press
at Rutgers University. |
"Lenin, who spent most of his life in the West and not in Russia, who knew the West much better than Russia, always wrote and said that the Western capitalists would do anything to strengthen the economy of the USSR. He said: They will bring us everything themselves, without thinking about their future. And, in a difficult moment, at a party meeting in Moscow, he said: 'Comrades, don't panic, when things get very though for us, we will give the bourgeoisie a rope, and the bourgeoisie will hang itself.' Then Karl Radek, who was a very resourceful wit,said: 'Vladimir Ilyich, but where are we going to get enough rope to hang the whole bourgeoisie?' Lenin effortlessly replied, ‘They will sell it to us themselves.' " -Alexander Solzhenitsyn, speech to the AFL-CIO, Washington, D.C., June 30, 1975
The revelation in the summer of 1987 that the Toshiba Company of Japan and Kongsberg Vaapenfabrik, Norway's state-owned armaments manufacturer, had sold giant milling machines to the USSR and computer software that allowed the Soviets to produce quieter, less detectable submarines, outraged the U.S. Congress. Yet technology transfer from West to East, from the free world to the unfree, and even from the United States to the Soviet Union, has been going on from the beginning of the socialist experiment.
The popularly accepted equivalence between the two "superpowers" has led to the myth that the USSR is essentially self-sufficient. This is perhaps less true today than ever, the Soviet economy having plummeted to an all-time low in 1987, when its gross national product grew less than 1 percent. There was clearly need for help—and, as in the past, that meant help from the West.
Ever since 1921, with only few interruptions, the USSR has been importing from the West significant quantities of material and know-how to modernize existing industries and to introduce new technology. Then, after a major Western—and especially American—technological infusion in the late 1920s and early 1930s that affected an estimated 95 percent of Soviet industry, the USSR expelled most capitalist businessmen, only to welcome them back, slowly, over the next three decades. The Western commercial presence in the USSR increased again, in the 1960s and particularly in the 1970s, in all areas of industry: motor vehicles, oil production, chemicals, electronics, steel, natural gas, fertilizers, and the navy. It is interesting to speculate whether the Soviet Union would in any sense be considered a superpower today had it not had the benefit of Western technology. Yet even today the USSR's superpower image is based primarily on its military and not on its economic
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