The English title promises more than the Russian one delivers. On the cover this is CMEA Today: From Economic Co-operation to Economic Integration — a forward march, a threshold crossed. The Russian title page underneath translates as something flatter and more honest: The Improvement of the Economic Interrelations of the CMEA Member-Countries. Progress Publishers, whose imprint this genuinely is, gave the export edition the triumphal arc; the author, N. V. Bautina — described on the book's own jacket as a Doctor of Economic Sciences and a professor at Moscow University — had written the more cautious book about adjusting a machine that was not yet running smoothly. The gap between the two titles is the gap this introduction is about.
The date matters, and it is not the date on the spine. The imprint code reads 1975, and that is when the English translation was issued, but the manuscript is older. Its latest political landmarks are the 24th Congress of the CPSU and the 25th Session of CMEA, both of 1971 — the session that adopted the Comprehensive Programme of socialist economic integration, which is the event the whole book exists to celebrate. The current five-year plan, 1971–1975, is discussed as a thing still unfolding: production "is expected to total," Bulgaria "plans to commission," output will "go up by 80 per cent by the end of 1975." Most tellingly for an economist, her account of how CMEA sets its prices stops at the review of 1965–66, which took world-capitalist prices of the late 1950s as its base. She says nothing of the price upheaval that broke over CMEA as her English edition went to press: the 1973 explosion in world oil prices, and the emergency reform of January 1975 that abandoned the fixed base for a rolling five-year average precisely to cope with it. A book on the CMEA market that does not know the oil shock happened was closed, in Russian, around 1972–73. Read it as an early-détente text in a mid-decade jacket, and the silences below are the silences of 1972, not of 1975.
What was it for? 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 just 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 Bautina's book is the answer's prospectus, written for a reader of English who needed persuading that a planned bloc could be something better than a cartel of command economies. Her recurring contrast is the one the genre lives on. Under capitalism "the reproduction cycle is geared to further private economic interests and as such cannot be a uniform structure"; the society "is disunited and does not have any common socio-economic interest." Under socialism, common ownership yields a "common economic interest" and the possibility of a single plan. That is the frame, and it is worth taking seriously before taking it apart, because Bautina is a real economist and parts of this book are real economics.
She should be given her due first, because the series' criticism is worth nothing if it cannot. The aspiration itself — to develop the economies of a dozen countries by conscious agreement rather than leaving their fates to the world market — is a serious idea, not a slogan, and Bautina argues it as an economist rather than chanting it. Her chapters document integration that actually happened: the pooling of raw-material, fuel and energy resources across states none of which could stand alone (Czechoslovakia importing all its oil, the GDR all its oil and iron ore, Poland ninety per cent of its iron ore); the joint investment projects and coordinated five-year plans of 1971–75; the machinery of collective credit through the International Bank for Economic Co-operation. Her long central discussion of value and price is genuine theoretical work: she takes up the Marxian problem of comparing labour embodied in the products of countries at different productivity levels, defends the use of averaged world-market prices as a base while trying to strip out their "distortions," and reasons carefully about international value as "the centre around which national values fluctuate." A reader who wants to understand how CMEA priced a tonne of Soviet oil against a Hungarian bus will learn something here that the polemics on either side rarely bother to explain.
She is also, to her credit, not a purveyor of fairy tales about harmony. In a passage that does the book more honour than its title does, she warns against exactly the picture her publisher is selling: "It would be wrong to look upon the socialist countries' community of economic interests as a kind of 'idyllic harmony' since it contains inherent contradictions." She names the sources of friction — "discrepancies in their levels of economic development, elements of state and economic isolation, the varying maturity of production relations" — and concedes that "certain divergencies between the national and overall international interests" are "inevitable." This is the reflexivity test's opening move, and Bautina passes the easy version of it: error is admitted, contradiction is admitted, the bloc is not painted as a seamless whole.
And then the category is withheld. This is where the book turns, and it turns on the discriminator this series has learned to apply: a Soviet volume will grant that its own side made mistakes, but it will never let the classification it reserves for the enemy point homeward. Bautina has built, over her fourth chapter, a full apparatus for analysing exploitation between nations. "International economic relations among the capitalist countries are based on exploitation and domination of the strong over the weak." The imperialist powers extract wealth "out of the economically backward countries through non-equivalent exchange and the export of capital"; value "acts in the world capitalist economy as a law of exploitation, of the plunder of developing countries." She defines non-equivalent exchange precisely — the power "to impose terms of exchange which are advantageous to it alone. This is the essence of non-equivalent exchange" — and she knows the mechanism that produces it, observing that "countries with a high labour productivity gain more from an equivalent commodity exchange" than their poorer partners.
Every one of these tools is the tool needed to ask the live question about CMEA itself: in an exchange of Soviet oil and ore for East European machinery, priced off a lagging world-market base, who gained? The debate over whether the USSR subsidised or milked its partners was real, and it was being conducted in the West and quietly within the bloc as Bautina wrote. She has the concepts. She does not turn them inward. The one time she brings equivalence to bear "with economic relations between socialist countries," it is to dissolve the question: "the importance of equivalent exchange is often exaggerated and is sometimes even identified with mutual benefit." Non-equivalent exchange, exploitation, the domination of the weak by the strong — these are predicated, across the whole book, only of capitalism and of imperialism's relation to the Third World. Between socialist states, common ownership is taken to guarantee that whatever the price ratios, the outcome is "mutual benefit." Error is admissible; the category is not. A socialist country may develop unevenly, may be "isolated," may diverge — but it cannot, by construction, be on either end of an unequal exchange with its neighbours.
The book's most eloquent evidence, though, is what it will not name, and here the reader has to know the history the text is quietly editing. The Comprehensive Programme of 1971 was not the natural fruit of harmony; it was a compromise forced by a decade of open conflict over precisely the "socialist division of labour" that gives Bautina her central category (she uses the phrase more than a hundred and forty times). In the early 1960s the USSR had pushed for supranational planning — a central CMEA organ that would assign each country its role. Romania refused, declining to be fixed as an agrarian supplier of the industrial north, and in 1964 came close to walking out. The Fourth International saw this clearly at the time. Its Eighth World Congress documents, printed in the International Socialist Review (vol. 27 no. 2, Spring 1966), describe the Soviet leaders scrambling to keep "a minimum of cohesion with Rumania, which was ready to break with the COMECON if this meant modifying development plans that stressed industrializing the country." The 1971 Programme is the settlement of that fight: it enshrined unanimity, voluntary participation and "no supranationality" as the price of Romanian assent.
Bautina's book is a monument to that defeat presented as a victory — and it registers the defeat only in its nervous tic. Again and again it insists on "respect for state sovereignty, independence and national interest, non-interference"; it defines CMEA as "an alliance of sovereign states, who are the rightful owners of their own means of production." Why the drumbeat of sovereignty in a hymn to integration? Because sovereignty was the flag under which integration had been fought to a standstill. The one member that made the book's whole argument a contest appears in these pages only as columns of trade figures — "Rumania (petroleum products)," "5,000 million roubles" of turnover — never as the state that nearly broke the bloc over the very principle Bautina is expounding. She names the country nineteen times and the conflict not once.
Czechoslovakia is the sharper case, because there the erasure is doubled. The country appears twenty-five times — importing oil, mining coking coal, projecting nuclear capacity "by 1990" — and never once as the country invaded by its allies in August 1968. The year 1968 occurs six times in the book; every instance is a statistic. The Prague Spring had an economic heart: Ota Šik's market reforms, an attempt to loosen the command system and, in part, to renegotiate Czechoslovakia's terms within CMEA. The tanks that ended it reasserted the discipline Bautina calls integration. She does mention "economic reform in the European socialist countries" — and neutralises it in a sentence, allowing the reforms only a "unique character" that "does nothing to erode the unity of its principal trends." The reforms become minor local colour on a single design; the man who led the boldest of them, Šik, is absent, as are Dubček, Prague, and the invasion itself. Intercontinental Press, reporting from the wreckage in February 1971, let a Czech dissident say what the book cannot: "Ota Sik was striving for — decentralized leadership, which is impossible in the present situation" (IP0906, 15 February 1971). Bautina's silence on 1968, in a book on how the bloc is bound together, is the silence of a book that cannot say what the binding cost. Yugoslavia, the market-socialist heretic just outside CMEA, and Albania, which quit it, are absent altogether — the two live alternatives to her model, unmentionable because to mention them would be to concede there was a choice.
The reply to a book like this is not a rival set of statistics but a different account of what the bloc was. Trotsky supplied it in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), the standard against which every Soviet self-portrait in this series should be read. His claim was that the USSR was not the harmonious community of its own propaganda but a workers' state deformed by a privileged bureaucracy — that "Soviet society is already divided into a secure and privileged minority, and a majority getting along in want" (ch. 6). Extend that stratum's logic across borders and Bautina's alliance of sovereign states furthering a common interest reads differently: a set of bureaucratic command economies whose planners answered first to their own national apparatuses, whose "integration" was negotiated between those apparatuses under the shadow of Soviet power, and whose harmony was maintained, when persuasion failed, by the means used at Prague. Ernest Mandel, the Fourth International's ablest economist, argued the general case at length — that the bureaucratic plan does not abolish the law of value or the pull of national interest but suppresses their expression, so that the "disproportions" and antagonisms Bautina ascribes to capitalist anarchy reappear inside the bloc as shortage, hoarding, and the endless haggling over prices and specialisation that CMEA's own history records. Where Bautina sees common ownership guaranteeing mutual benefit, this tradition sees the unresolved question of who plans, for whom — the question her category of non-equivalent exchange was built to ask and was forbidden to ask at home.
So read CMEA Today for the half of it that is honest work: the pricing theory, the documentation of real joint projects, the flat admission that the community "contains inherent contradictions." That admission is the crack through which everything else should be read. Bautina knew the bloc was not an idyll; she had the tools to measure exactly how it was not; and she was permitted to point every one of them outward and none of them inward. The two questions this series puts to such a book are whether its accusations are cashed into acts that could be shown not to have happened, and whether the category it wields against the enemy could ever, in principle, apply to the author's own side. On the first Bautina is careful and often persuasive about capitalism. On the second the answer is the one that dates and convicts the book: Romania had nearly left over this, Czechoslovakia had been invaded over it, and in the economics of socialist integration, the word for what the strong may do to the weak was available in every chapter — and reserved, always, for the other side of the wall.