ABSTRACT
The international emergence of the Soviet Union and its recently consolidated entourage of satellites in the 1950s appeared to many to pose a formidable threat to the economic interests of the developed capitalist countries in the less developed countries. The Soviet-type economies offered stable and rapidly growing markets in return for capital equipment that incorporated a rugged, intermediate-level technology more suitable to factor proportions of the LDCs and easy to maintain. In the bargain, the Soviet Union and its allies not only appeared ready to grant generous credits in the form of projects that could be repaid in future goods flows, but they also were more than willing to send cadres of technicians to set up plants and to train relatively large numbers of persons from the LDCs, both on the project sites and in their own educational facilities. That training was mixed with not a little political indoctrination and that mutual economic advantages were supplemented with more than a little anti-imperialist, anticolonialist feeling among the LDCs all seemed to add up to very significant capabilities for the Soviet bloc to wage economic warfare against the capitalist states in the rest of the world. 1
