Trade with Russia

Report Outline
U.S.-Russian Trade and Politiacl Relations
Size and Composition of Trade with Russia
East-West Trade and European Recovery
Special Focus

U.S.-Russian Trade and Politiacl Relations

First Flurry Over Export of Potential War Goods

Dissension between the United States and Russia, combined with the demands of the European Recovery Program on American production, is bringing about a sharp reduction in exports from this country to the Soviet Union. Although the full extent of the reduction is not reflected in currently available trade statistics, the flow of American goods to Russia is already being restricted under tightened export controls recently put into force. It is expected to thin to a trickle as application of the Marshall Plan gets under way.

Soviet trade, except during the period of wartime lend-lease shipments, never has bulked large in United States export totals. The value of American commodities delivered to Russia in 1947 formed an even smaller percentage of total exports than before the war. The trade became an object of protest only because of the deterioration in Soviet-American political relations. Mounting concern over the possibility of war with Russia gave rise to mounting criticism of the shipment to that nation of industrial machinery and other commodities of potential war value.

Objections to the trade with Russia were first raised last November when attention was directed to the fact that considerable quantities of heavy industrial equipment, some of it classified as lend-lease, had been exported to the Soviet Union during the first nine months of 1947. The State Department promptly explained that the lend-lease shipments comprised goods, purchased under a postwar credit agreement, to which the Soviet Union had acquired title before the lend-lease pipeline had been shut down at the end of 1946. Chairman Bridges (R., N. H.) of the Senate Appropriations Committee nevertheless took the administration to task for permitting the shipments and threatened to hold up funds for interim aid to Europe. He said he found it hard to understand “how the government can call upon the Congress to stop the threat of Communism and at the same time … justify by any stretch of the imagination these lend-lease shipments to Russia or any other delivery of materials.”