Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Randall W. Stone. Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade. Princeton Studies in International History and Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. xviii, 283 pp. Tables. Bibliography. Index. $39.50, cloth.This book, which is based on the author's prize-winning doctoral dissertation, examines the trading relationships between the former USSR and its European satellites between the end of World War II and the collapse of the command economies in Eastern and Central Europe. It is a fascinating work, a tale told with verve, and with very thoughtful analysis of what was perhaps considered in the West to be a comparatively straightforward, mutually beneficial trading relationship. What emerges from the author's analysis is anything but a straightforward association between nations with political commonality-it is a mixture of deviousness and strategic deflection of trade requirements by the satellite nations (while at the same time winning the maximum amount of subsidy from the USSR) and the intransigence of the USSR's bureaucratic system and its inability effectively to monitor or enforce trade commitments.As a result, countries within the USSR's sphere of influence can be seen employing various measures to minimize their individual contributions, depending on the nature of domestic industrial activity and their own success in other international markets. Stone argues that, by employing this individual approach, satellite countries missed significant opportunities for collective economic benefit.The author utilizes a wide range of newly-available sources in Moscow, Prague and Warsaw, together with the personal testimony of some of the officials involved in trade negotiations, in order to provide a detailed examination of these negotiations from the inside and, through astute analysis, provides an insight into the political processes surrounding these negotiations. This detailed examination explains how and why those outcomes that seemed less desirable for the satellite countries were altered. It is also shows that, due to problems endemic in the USSR's monitoring systems, these changes or shortfalls often went undetected.There seems little doubt that the USSR did not make effective use of her powerful position in trade negotiations. For various reasons, she did not bring to bear the full scope of her bargaining power and also failed to link economic and security issues and did not integrate several important factors within the trading mechanisms. The satellite countries, on the other hand, were especially good at linking subsidies to trade and achieved success in the former while, at the same time, minimizing the quality and scope of actual deliveries of goods under the trade agreements. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".