The communist states replied to the U.S. Marshall Plan by establishing the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, which Soviet leader Joseph Stalin saw as a means of enforcing Soviet-style economic development in Eastern Europe to counter Western influence. The agency became more active after Stalin’s death but ceased to exist when the Soviet Union itself collapsed.
On January 25, 1949, the Moscow Joint Communiqué was issued by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, as well as the heads of state of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. This document announced the founding of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon, or CMEA). It represented the Soviet rejection of the United States’ Marshall Plan
Council for Mutual Economic Assistance[02850]
War
From the very earliest stages of World War II, the Allied Powers were forced to paper over numerous conflicts of interest among the coalition’s partners.
The Red Army faced the full fury of the Wehrmacht (German army), losing millions of soldiers while inflicting three-fourths of all the casualties suffered by Germany during the war. Meanwhile, despite numerous urgent requests from Stalin to open a second front in Europe, the United States and Great Britain made no moves to comply until 1944. By this time, the Red Army had already destroyed the Wehrmacht as a fighting force on the eastern front and was rapidly rolling back the remainder, occupying vast areas of eastern Europe in its drive to the German homeland.
Planning for the end of the war and the postwar recovery had begun in earnest by 1943.
This approach was consistent with the outcomes of previous great power conflicts; furthermore, it comported handily with the plans of Great Britain and France for the reestablishment of their own colonial empires. However, the American plan was for a postwar order based on open markets in a system of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) that would maintain the collective security of all nations. This plan was incompatible with the perceived needs of the Soviet Union. The United Nations (in which the Soviet Union had veto power) was the only international institution in which the Soviets regularly participated.
The United States saw the major challenges of the postwar period to be the reconstruction of Europe and Asia, the restoration of a stable world economy, the establishment of an effective system of collective security, and limiting the influence of the Soviet Union in world affairs. The “Truman Doctrine”
Kennan’s work provided the theoretical rationale for the Truman Doctrine; he was also one of the chief authors of the Marshall Plan
Under the plan, aid was conditional on the recipient’s willingness to disclose all economic information to the United States, accept a fixed exchange rate for its currency, eliminate trade barriers, and adopt a number of other structural reforms. With those restrictions, Marshall Plan aid was available to all European nations, including the Soviet Union and its satellites. The Soviets sent Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, Stalin’s minister of foreign affairs, to the Paris Meetings (June, 1946) to explore the terms for obtaining economic assistance, and he left after only a few days, declaring that the U.S. plan was an imposition on national sovereignty, because it required the disclosure of financial information that the Soviets deemed too sensitive to reveal to the world’s capitalist powers. Moreover, the plan seemed to Molotov to be designed rapidly to rebuild Germany in order to aid in the U.S. containment strategy by reconstituting the German threat to the Soviet Union. Consequently, Moscow forbade all of its Eastern European satellite nations from receiving Marshall Plan aid.
Upon Molotov’s return to Moscow in July of 1947, Stalin announced the Soviet response to the Marshall Plan: The Molotov Plan would be a program of in-kind aid and technical assistance, administered through a series of bilateral agreements between the Soviet Union and the nations under its influence. Stalin intended to use Soviet economic and military advantages to impose
The Moscow Joint Communiqué of January, 1949, established Comecon as the institutional framework for the coordination of numerous national economic plans. The stated purpose of the organization was to coordinate economic planning and share technology among member nations. Members were all entitled to “sovereign equality,” meaning “one-nation, one vote” in all decision-making processes. Each member was allowed to declare an “interest” in any matter under consideration; all participation was voluntary. The dominance of the Soviet economy in the region, however, gave the Soviets a disproportionate say in collective decisions. Nevertheless, they were unable to prevent countries from opting out of the organization, meaning that Comecon never obtained formal supranational authority.
The structure and proximate goals of Comecon evolved over the years to reflect the varying foci of Soviet security strategy. This approach to economic integration suffered from a variety of technical defects as regarded purely economic criteria for efficiency. It persisted, because Comecon served extremely well as an instrument for the advancement of the Soviet Union’s fundamental strategic objectives: maintaining and extending the nation’s political dominance within its sphere, using client states to finance Soviet reconstruction, maintaining the buffer zone of pliable regimes, and cultivating a group of dependent allied nations to bolster Soviet influence on the United Nations. Comecon was finally declared defunct with the dissolution of the Soviet Union on June 28, 1991.
The formation of Comecon served to crystallize the existing and emerging Cold War lines of division between the United States and the Soviet Union, and it accelerated the growth of tension in the superpower rivalry. It also froze Germany’s political structure, forcing the nation to remain partitioned for another four decades. Comecon served as an adjunct to the process of creating a system of communist military alliances known as the Warsaw Pact, and it did much to shape the relatively favorable image the Soviets enjoyed among the less developed nations within its sphere. It probably carried within it the seeds of its own destruction, however, since the satellite nations received relatively favorable terms on the resources they received from the Soviets for most of the period. This implicit subsidy to the Soviets’ client states turned out to be a measure that the Soviet economy could ill afford in the long run.
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Berger, Helge, and Albrecht Ritschl. “Germany and the Political Economy of the Marshall Plan, 1947-1952: A Re-Revisionist View.” In Europe’s Postwar Recovery, edited by Barry Eichengreen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Argues that the linkage of several issue areas through the conditionality of Marshall Plan aid served a wider purpose than simply assisting in postwar rebuilding: It was also intended to foster a much tighter degree of European economic integration than was actually achieved. -
Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Addresses the question as to whether the Cold War was inevitable; his answer is in the affirmative. -
Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. New York: Penguin Press, 2005. Provides a very thorough look at the economic histories of Eastern European countries. -
Riasanovsky, Nicholas V., and Mark Steinberg. A History of Russia. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Excellent overview of the roots of the Cold War conflict; includes chapters on the transition into capitalism at the end of the twentieth century.
Soviets Take Control of Eastern Europe
Truman Doctrine
Communists Seize Power in Czechoslovakia
Marshall Plan Provides Aid to Europe
Germany Splits into Two Republics
Western European Union Is Established
Warsaw Pact Is Signed
Soviets Crush Hungarian Uprising