Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev. by Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 278 pp. $99.00.

Abstract

In Red Globalization, Oscar Sanchez-Sibony offers a thoughtful and thought-provoking reinterpretation of Soviet history. Like other scholars in recent years, Sanchez-Sibony is interested in bringing the USSR into a broader global perspective. His approach is fittingly Soviet, with economics (specifically foreign trade) at the center of his historical analysis.The book's subtitle suggests an exclusive focus on the Cold War era, but the first chapter presents a well-supported interpretation of the rise of the Stalinist economic order as a response to international economic crisis. In this view, the turn to heavy industry and toward autarky was not so much a fulfillment of a long-lived Bolshevik vision as it was a policy forced by the collapse of European trading patterns in the 1920s. A second chapter on World War II and postwar reconstruction similarly argues that the Soviet Union did not so much turn away from Europe (at least in economic terms) as it was abandoned and isolated by it.The rise of U.S. hegemony in the aftermath of World War II presented numerous challenges to the USSR in the economic sphere. As the postwar world was coming into being, Sibony-Sanchez suggests, Soviet trade officials reached bilateral trade agreements (and many import and export deals) with firms and governments in Western Europe and Japan. But U.S. efforts to create a free-trade world functioning in a multilateral framework and underwritten by a steady, strong, and freely traded dollar sharply curtailed such opportunities. U.S.-led restrictions on Western trade with the Soviet bloc were yet another impediment to the integration of the USSR into the capitalist world economy.Red Globalization suggests the aptness of the 1970s insult that the Soviet Union was little more than “Upper Volta with missiles.” Like the African country now known as Burkina Faso, the USSR faced serious constraints in the open international trading system that emerged under U.S. sponsorship: a perennial shortage of hard currency. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Soviet Union was one of many countries chafing under hard-currency (specifically dollar) constraints. But as the dollar-based world economy expanded, even the poorest West European countries found it easier to trade within the capitalist world than with the USSR. Thus the Soviet Union found itself in a version of the same predicament as Upper Volta and the rest of the Third World: in search of hard currency and with only (or mostly) raw materials to offer in exchange. Soviet manufactured goods were rarely competitive on the world market, and even its primary products often failed on that score too.In this context, superpower status became an added burden. Efforts to win “hearts and minds” in the Third World came at a hefty price tag, as Sanchez-Sibony notes. The Soviet Union and the underdeveloped countries often had similar export profiles, so complementarity was hard to come by. Ultimately, Sanchez-Sibony concludes, Soviet officials strove for the same arrangement that their Third World counterparts pursued: integration into the capitalist economy, if only incomplete and on unfavorable terms of trade.Among the many insights of Red Globalization is the insistence that Soviet leaders reckoned with the capitalist economy as rational economic actors—ideological bluster notwithstanding. References to the advantages of the “international division of labor” emerged not just from University of Chicago economists but also from Soviet ministers (p. 98); wheeling and dealing in trade negotiations was the province of the Old Bolshevik Anastas Mikoyan (p. 107), not just the capitalists so frequently excoriated in Soviet public discourse.Even more impressive is that this story is told using an archival source base that is broad but spotty and inconsistent. Using documents scattered in the records of the USSR's State Planning Committee, the Ministry of Foreign Trade, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and elsewhere, Sanchez-Sibony finds telling evidence to support his major points. The sporadic nature of the records means that Red Globalization often shifts from one setting to another as it accumulates evidence. Thus, a single section might include brief vignettes of trade negotiations with three or four different countries, with some of the final results of the negotiations unknown. But Sanchez-Sibony's extraordinary efforts at combing through, and making sense of, chaotic archival holdings pay off handsomely.Sanchez-Sibony seems to take well-deserved pride in the book's many insights and novel interpretations, and with good reason. Based on his prize-winning dissertation, Red Globalization offers an important and indeed sweeping reinterpretation of Soviet history. Yet the book's frequent criticism of other scholars is distinctly unappealing. This tendency devolves into tendentiousness; for instance, in the passage (p. 4) that repeats the word “wrong” four times in three lines. But despite this occasional cantankerousness—not to mention the publisher's decision to price the book out of reach for individual scholars—Red Globalization is an important, indeed essential, perspective on the role of foreign trade in Soviet history.