Center For Security Policy Commends Czechs For Demanding An End To Soviet Exploitation

The Center for Security Policy today applauded Czechoslovakia’s call for suspension of inequitable trade arrangements imposed on it and five other Eastern European nations by the Soviet Union. In a breathtaking display of the genuine "New Thinking" coming out of Prague — in sharp contrast to Moscow’s recent retrenchment on economic reform — the recently installed non-communist Czech finance minister, Vaclav Klaus, announced yesterday that the Communist trading bloc (known as COMECON) was a dead letter.

According to the Financial Times of London, "Mr. Klaus said that Czechoslovakia would be asking for the annulment of multilateral agreements signed within COMECON and, should other members not agree, then Prague would unilaterally drop them." He added, "COMECON cannot function the way it is now and there is no reason for it to exist anymore."

In fact, the only reason for COMECON ever to have existed was to facilitate Moscow’s colonial exploitation of its East European satellites. It was founded in 1949 at a time when the Soviet Union was determined to prevent nations under its domination from accepting Marshall Plan aid from the United States. Under COMECON, the USSR was able to dictate preferential trading arrangements; two ministers of foreign trade (those of Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria) were executed for bargaining too hard with the Soviet Union. As a result of such preferential terms, to cite but one example, the Soviet Union has been able to run up a debt to Hungary worth upwards of a billion dollars for exported goods and services. COMECON similarly enables Moscow to influence financial flows and investment among member nations.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director said, "The Czech announcement is of signal importance. It reveals one of the dirty little secrets of the communist bloc — namely Moscow’s imperial exploitation of its ‘fraternal allies.’ By announcing that COMECON’s terms would either be altered or abrogated, the Czechs have established that free people will not live under what remains today an Evil Empire."

Gaffney added, "The willingness of other, newly formed regimes of Eastern Europe to follow the Czech lead on COMECON will be a key litmus test of the integrity and true independence of these regimes. By the same token, the demand for an end to Soviet domination in the economic sphere should be paralleled by a call for the immediate termination of the means whereby the Soviet Union continues its domination of the military, internal security, technology acquisition and espionage activities of the nations of Eastern Europe.