Execution of Foreign Commercial Awards in Post-War Soviet Bilateral Treaty Practice

Abstract

In 1945, H. J. Hilton, Jr., published an excellent article in the Department of State Bulletin entitled “Commercial Arbitration in the Treaties and Agreements of the U.S.S.R.” which assessed the Soviet record in this area up to the end of the Second World War. The purpose of the present study is to carry the inquiry forward to the present, concentrating, however, exclusively on the problem of execution of foreign commercial arbitral awards in Soviet bilateral treaty practice during this period.Before proceeding though, a quick review of the salient points of Mr. Hilton’s survey will furnish useful background information.First, in analyzing the corpus of Soviet treaties and agreements that feature statements concerning arbitration of commercial disputes, the author found that, while the relevant provisions ranged in detail from a single phrase to comprehensive conventions containing as many as 15 articles, the data did not reveal a pattern of historic evolution in the type of formulas regarding arbitration. In other words, although the Soviet regime passed through several phases of development between 1921, when such a reference initially appeared in a treaty signed by the R.S.F.S.R., and 1945, this did not entail technical changes reflecting specific policy shifts; the various approaches used recur throughout the span of observation without any determinable regularity and no correlation could be fixed between the choice of a particular solution and the prevailing conditions at home or abroad at a given juncture. The conclusion here, then, was that “the provisions referring to arbitration included in the treaties and agreements of the U.S.S.R. vary considerably in content; however, these variations cannot be established precisely by periods of time.”