ABSTRACT
During his September 1989 meeting with Secretary of State James Baker, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze expressed the Soviet Union’s interest in actively participating in three postwar international economic institutions: the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The Soviet Union, although a centrally planned, socialist economy, as a victor in the Second World War participated in the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, which formed the postwar economic institutions. Designers of the postwar international economic order, which was to be based upon the concept of free trade in order to preclude a recurrence of hostile trade practices, proposed three complimentary multilateral institutions to facilitate free trade. Renewed Soviet interest in these institutions reflects the incompatibility of economic isolation with President Gorbachev’s policy of “openness” in Soviet society and foreign policy.
