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Politics and Soviet-American Trade: The Three Questions

By Daniel Yergin
April 1977
Article Summary and Author Biography

With great fanfare, representatives of the United States and the Soviet Union signed a trade agreement in Moscow in October 1972. By this point, trade between the two countries, starting from a very low level ("trivial," Aleksei Kosygin called it in 1971), was already beginning a rapid rise. It continued to grow over the next few years. The total trade turnover between the two countries was almost four times greater in 1972-74 than in 1969-71. Much higher levels yet and still more intense cooperation seemed shortly in store. Then, in January 1975, the Soviet Union announced that it would not agree to put the trade agreement into formal effect. It said that the conditions attached by the U. S. Congress to the development of trade - specifically, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment on emigration and the Stevenson Amendment on export credits - violated the terms of the 1972 agreement, and so effectively voided it.

Daniel Yergin is the author of Shattered Peace, published by Houghton Mifflin this spring. He is a Lecturer at the Harvard Business School and a Research Fellow at Harvard's Center for International Affairs.

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With great fanfare, representatives of the United States and the Soviet Union signed a trade agreement in Moscow in October 1972. By this point, trade between the two countries, starting from a very low level ("trivial," Aleksei Kosygin called it in 1971), was already beginning a rapid rise. It continued to grow over the next few years. The total trade turnover between the two countries was almost four times greater in 1972-74 than in 1969-71. Much higher levels yet and still more intense cooperation seemed shortly in store. Then, in January 1975, the Soviet Union announced that it would not agree to put the trade agreement into formal effect. It said that the conditions attached by the U. S. Congress to the development of trade - specifically, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment on emigration and the Stevenson Amendment on export credits - violated the terms of the 1972 agreement, and so effectively voided it.

Since the Soviet renunciation, trade has stagnated, though superficially such does not appear to be the case. The total volume of U. S. exports to the Soviet Union has generally continued to rise - a peak of $1,195 million in 1973 was followed by a drop to $607 million in 1974, and then by further increases, to $1,833 million in 1975 and $2,300 million in 1976.1

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