Molotov Plan

• 1. The Brother Plan

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  Inside the Soviet Union, the Molotov Plan went by a warmer name: the Brother Plan. It was Moscow's system for rebuilding the countries of Central and Eastern Europe that were politically and economically aligned with it. It can be seen as the Soviet version of the Marshall Plan. That comparison raises sharper questions. Did Moscow really create this system as a reply to America? Why did it turn down American money, and what did it demand of its neighbors in return? And was a program of aid really only about aid?

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• 2. Older Than Marshall

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  The year 1945 undercuts the idea that Moscow was merely reacting. The Soviet system had started operating in Central and Eastern Europe as early as that year, about two years before the American Marshall Plan of 1947. The American offer came with a political catch for the region. Countries there could not join it without leaving the Soviet sphere of influence. Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, rejected the Marshall Plan. That rejection turned the Molotov Plan into a Soviet-sponsored economic grouping, which was eventually expanded to become Comecon. What Moscow feared in the American offer is the next question.

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• 3. Refusing American Money

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  The conditions attached to the Marshall Plan were the sticking point for Moscow. Soviet leaders believed those conditions were meant to weaken Soviet interests in its satellite states and to make recipients economically dependent on the United States. Officially, one of the American goals was to prevent the spread of Communism. So the Soviet Union refused the aid itself and would not let its satellite states accept it. The effect was that countries in Europe could stop relying on American aid and reorganize their trade toward the Soviet Union instead. The tool for that reorganization was a web of bilateral deals.

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• 4. Trade as Strategy

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  Between 1945 and 1947, the USSR concluded eleven important agreements with its satellites. The technique was a network of trade agreements rather than a single pooled fund. In most of them, the Soviet Union sent raw materials and food, such as grain, coal, cotton and metals. In return it received manufactured goods and equipment for its own industries. The ambitions behind these deals came in two tiers. The maximum aims were economic control over Europe, adapting European economies to the Soviet one, and turning them into a market for Soviet surpluses. The minimum aim was governments that were friendly, at least, to the Soviet Union. Yet the same Soviet ledger had another column, one where money flowed toward Moscow.

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• 5. Aid and Reparations

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  A payment plan of $900 million over 8 years shows the contradiction at the heart of the plan. At the same time the Soviets were giving aid to Eastern Bloc countries, they were demanding reparations from members of the Axis powers. Many of those were Eastern Bloc countries themselves, or predecessors of them. The Soviet Union received regular payments from Italy, Romania, Hungary and Finland. Germany was a special case. The Soviets sought hundreds of millions of dollars from East Germany's economy, and the Red Army lived off the land it occupied, sparing Soviet domestic resources. The Soviet Union had sustained high casualties and losses in World War II, and it did not refrain from taking what it could in Germany. Seven states appear on the list of participants: the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and East Germany.

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