ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses Soviet-West German economic relations since 1970 against the general foreign policy background. The conditions for growth in the Soviet economy had also changed such that “at the beginning of the 1970s the last remaining untapped source of Soviet economic growth was the exploitation of the advantages to be had from international trade. Leonid I Brezhnev stated that “an increasing international division of labor in the development of every nation, regardless of its wealth or given level of economic development is a sign of the times". According to Brezhnev the extension of “economic, scientific and technical relations with the capitalist countries’’ was to serve to strengthen and extend the “material basis for the policy of peaceful coexistence.” In particular, trade and economic relations were to be more rapidly developed with those Western countries “which showed a genuine willingness to cooperate and saw to it that cooperation took place under normal balanced conditions”.
