Looking for Economic Cooperation between Austria and the Soviet Union during Khrushchev’s Thaw

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the development of a more correct model of the relationship between East and West. The traditional view of Europe after 1945 with its opposite and mutually exclusive military and economic organizations is characterized in traditional historiography by the existence of a symmetrical and parallel development of two ideological blocs during the bipolar confrontation of the systems. In the context of modifying this model, the article proposes to consider the continent as a complex space where parallelism, asymmetry, and convergence coexist, and which has seen multi-level cooperation between a wide range of subjects in various fields. All this will allow a new assessment of the degree of involvement of the USSR in global economic relations. Particular attention is paid to the compensatory supply of goods in accordance with the State Treaty after 1955, as well as the attempts of the Soviet leadership to establish bilateral trade. A comparative analysis of the mechanisms for the implementation of Soviet-Austrian economic cooperation makes it possible to show more clearly how fundamentally different socio-economic systems could interact and how they adapted to the new economic reality. The author mostly refers to documents from the Russian State Archive of Economics and the Bruno Kreisky Archive Foundation, which have not been used previously, and are first introduced into scholarly circulation.