Торгово-экономические и научно-технические связи США и СССР в годы разрядки (Обзор российских исследований 1972–2022 гг.)

Abstract

Russian historians, political scientists and experts in the field of international relations theory have been developing the topic of interaction between the USSR and the USA in the economic, scientific and technical field during the years of detente in bilateral relations for 50 years. Nevertheless, to date, the experience of working together within the framework of a large-scale research agenda in various fields of science, accumulated by scientists of the two countries, has not been properly evaluated. This review attempts to assess the place of these contacts in the structure of the Soviet-American detente and to characterize the main stages of the evolution in Russian historiography of this problem. An important provision for understanding the specifics of the scientific and technical context of the Soviet-American detente is that the differences in approaches of Moscow and Washington to the formation of bilateral relations as a whole were most clearly manifested in this very direction. The obvious discrepancy between the goals of the parties, as well as their different understanding of the essence of detente as a special state of bilateral relations, led to the fact that its results were limited, and the process itself was short. A cross-cutting, unifying element of Russian research on this topic for almost 50 years has been the fixation on the opened but missed opportunities for scientific and technical cooperation between superpowers during the period of relative warming of relations. This motive does not allow us to explain why, against the background of somewhat inflated expectations of Soviet politicians and intellectuals, American and European contemporaries pointed out the USSR lagging behind in the development and introduction of new technologies into production in the second half of the 1970s, and, as a result, its vulnerable position in the bargaining process. The question is left unanswered as well: should the temporary rise of the U.S.–Soviet economic, scientific and technical cooperation be considered a natural stage in the development of international relations, or was it a historical anomaly, an optional by-product of the Cold War? It is noted that each stage of the development of Russian historiography was associated with the expansion of the source base, however, since the publication of the last major works in the 1990s – early 2000s, access to available documentary resources on this subject has significantly expanded. The authors conclude that new archival documents, as well as the increasing role of high technologies and breakthrough discoveries in the modern foreign policy process, encourage additional study on the problems of bilateral American-Soviet scientific and technological cooperation in the 1970s.