ABSTRACT
The latest scholarly books written on the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) in the late 1980s show a great deal of sympathy and curiosity in relation to Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the supposed changes to the stagnating system of state socialism he embodied. Scrutinizing the policies of the Gorbachev administration doesn’t mean that there weren’t attempts at radical reform in the late 1980s in the Eastern Bloc in general and in the Soviet Union in particular. But with regards to the CMEA and to economic relations with the Global South CMEA reforms were – at least till 1989 – more often in line with prior reform measures than they constituted radical departures from preceding policies. While being strongly opposed to market integration in the 1960s and 1970s, the Gorbachev administration embraced elements of market-oriented reforms. But the rest of the bloc had changed as well.
