orb@whuxl.UUCP (SEVENER) (01/01/70)
Jim Matthews has presented evidence that Western businessmen, particularly from the U.S. were especially eager to trade with the Bolsheviks. > > > From Jim Matthews: > Mr. Sevener's recollections on this point have more to do with > domestic politics here than the situation in Russia. Adam Ulam, in > Expansion and Coexistance, says "In their approaches to the United > States, Soviet policy-makers from the beginning used the technique of > opening up vistas of a vast and profitable trade....it is startling > to find Lenin in May 1918 sketching out for Robins (for communication > to the State Department) a plan for Russian exports to the United > States for the current year in the amount of 3 billion rubles." Having "plans" for massive trade with the West and having success with those plans are two different things. It would be quite easy to find evidence that Castro in Cuba has had "plans" to trade with the U.S. from the day he took power. It is rather ridiculous for a country 90 miles from the U.S. to have a country hundreds of miles away as its major trading partner. Yet this has been the situation for Cuba since shortly after Castro's revolution due to the U.S. embargo on Cuban trade. The same tactic was used against Allende's Marxist government in Chile: loans that had been regularly approved for years were summarily cutoff from Chile, ostensibly because of "problems with inflation". Almost immediately after General Pinochet and the military staged their CIA supported coup these loans were approved despite a severalfold increase in the inflation rate. Were these loans denied for purely economic reasons? Or were they denied to put political pressure on Allende? Right now the U.S. government is miffed at New Zealand for refusing to allow nuclear-armed ships to dock at her harbors. There have been rumors that the Reagan administration is considering an economic embargo to force New Zealand to accept these nuclear-armed ships. Is this for economic or blatantly political reasons? That the nascent Soviet Union desired trade with the West is quite likely. However that hardly proves that Western allies very concerned with the "Bolshevik threat" and particularly the U.S. actually engaged in such trade. You will need more evidence than proof of Soviet *intentions*. tim sevener whuxl!orb