MANIPUR, India, June 3 (UPI) -- After it
became clear that Winston Churchill had been right at Fulton, Missouri after
World War II and that the Soviet Union had imposed an "Iron Curtain"
on postwar Europe, the United States began a policy of "containment"
against Moscow.
This involved the putting in place of a
cordon sanitaire that blocked Moscow from access to significant sections of
Western markets and technology. Countries that were not already communist were
sought to be kept away from Soviet influence, while within that bloc, those
republics such as Yugoslavia that demonstrated some independence of the Soviet
Union were encouraged in their behavior by access to Western financial and
other resources
The Soviet Union, both individually and
through its satellites, imposed a quarantine on Western -- principally American
-- scholars and others from civil society, who were given either zero or highly
restricted access to the Soviet bloc. However, the choking-off of such
non-official contacts was not one way. Successive Cold War U.S. governments
encouraged neither tourism nor investment to the Soviet bloc. In the case of
countries such as Cuba, they were explicitly banned by Washington
This denial of markets and direct
knowledge of the functioning of a modern economy resulted in the Soviet Union
having to re-invent not one but several wheels, either by stealing or by
developing technology on its own. Refused the chance of cross-fertilization
with Western financial and mercantile infrastructure, the Soviet economy
remained mired in a command system that often relied exclusively on
quantitative measures of performance.
