Technology and Trade: Russia's Pursuit of American Investment, 1917?1929
1993; Oxford University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-7709.1993.tb00587.x
ISSN1467-7709
Autores Tópico(s)Canadian Identity and History
ResumoIn the years after the Russian Revolution, Bolshevik leaders frequently expressed a strong commitment to trade with the United States. “We have resolved on economic relations with America,” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin told a Chicago Daily News correspondent in September 1919. “With all countries,” he was quick to add, “but especially with America.”1 Leonid Krasin, Soviet commissar of foreign trade, told American representatives in London that his government viewed commercial cooperation with the United States as “indispensable.”2 Confirmation of a steadfast Soviet design for American trade and investment after the revolution comes from historians as well. John Lewis Gaddis identifies a “persistent theme in Soviet diplomacy: the view that the interests of the Soviet state could be promoted by facilitating ‘businesslike’ dealings with foreign capitalists.”3 This Soviet policy toward the United States contrasted sharply with the irresolution that American and Soviet observers have depicted as typifying Washington's policy toward Moscow. From 1917 to 1933, the U.S. government inconsistently supported both diplomatic isolation from and increasingly important economic contacts with Russia. As Warren Cohen notes, America was officially “unfriendly” during these years, yet “made no effort to prevent the transfer of important technology to the Soviet state.” Joan Hoff-Wilson suggests that Charles Evans Hughes and Herbert Hoover, the leading cabinet members during both the Harding and Coolidge administrations, “found it difficult to decide whether to take advantage of what Russian market there was or to use economic pressure against the Soviets.”4
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