The USSR on the Special Session of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the World Conference of Communist and Workers Parties, Moscow, 1969.

Abstract

In 1969 the USSR hosted the XXIII CMEA session and the world Conference of Communist and Workers Parties. The special format of the economic meeting, which decided to develop a program of socialist integration, was induced by a complex of Soviet internal and external causes. Primarily, by the need to offer a constructive economic alternative to forceful methods of maintaining the unity of the European socialist countries after the military action in Czechoslovakia, moving away from Soviet-style socialism of China, Albania, Yugoslavia, disagreements with Romania, as well as by difficulties in the Soviet economy. By ensuring the loyalty of the European allies, the session helped to solve one of the main foreign policy tasks of the USSR in the struggle for global economic and technological superiority, derived from the confrontation of the two opposing systems — the preservation of unity and primacy in the world communist and labor movement. The Soviet stance, presented at the session by A.N. Kosygin, was characterized by lack of ideological invectives, was marked by pragmatism, focused on integration into the world market, and appealed to universal commodity-money instruments. The Conference compensated the weak ideological component of the session by establishing, due to the nature of the Soviet state, the class boundaries of the development of the socialist system as the leading force of the world revolutionary process, the main combat detachment in the struggle against imperialism. The interconnection of the session and the meeting highlighted the contradictory tendency in the USSR’s complex foreign policy configuration at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, — the shift in subordination of Soviet economic interests to the political class motives, which would only increase in future.