CMEA Today: From Economic Co-operation To Economic Integration

The English title promises more than the Russian one delivers. On the cover this is a forward march, a threshold crossed; the Russian title page underneath translates as something flatter and more honest, about improving the economic interrelations of the member countries. The author had written the more cautious book, about adjusting a machine that was not yet running smoothly.

CMEA - Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance - bound the USSR, the East European states, Mongolia and Cuba into a trading and planning bloc, and in 1971 it had set itself the goal of integration: coordinating investment, specialising production across borders, running fifteen or twenty years of development to a shared design. This was the socialist answer to the Common Market, and the book is the answer's prospectus.

N. V. Bautina was a Doctor of Economic Sciences and a professor at Moscow University, and she argues as an economist rather than chanting. The aspiration itself - developing a dozen economies by conscious agreement rather than leaving their fates to the world market - is a serious idea, and the chapters documenting how integration was actually supposed to work, including the machinery of price-setting inside the bloc, are the most detailed account available in English.

One caution on dating. The manuscript closed around 1972-73: its landmarks are the Twenty-Fourth Congress and the Twenty-Fifth Session of CMEA, both 1971, the current five-year plan is discussed in the future tense, and the account of CMEA pricing stops at the review of 1965-66. It does not know that the oil shock happened, or that CMEA overhauled its pricing in January 1975 to cope.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.