ABSTRACT
The idea of the state monopoly on foreign trade was integrally tied in with the theory of socialist revolution and with the economic platform of the CPSU drafted by the founder of the Soviet state, V. I. Lenin, in the period leading up to the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917. Lenin proposed its actual establishment in the first months of the Soviet state’s existence. While the foundations of the structure and management of foreign economic operations and the state monopoly principle have remained unaltered, their legal and organizational forms have changed to meet the needs of the Soviet state at certain stages of the development of the economy. Notwithstanding its almost seventy-year existence in the USSR and the by and large considerable development of the USSR’s economic and scientific-technological ties with foreign countries, there has been, as know, quite a diversity of views and assessments of the state monopoly over the organization and management of foreign economic operations.
