Ironically, the construction of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance building in Moscow began on May 1, 1967, on the Workers’ Solidarity Day, which was celebrated in all the Warsaw Bloc states.
“This building has a Moscow address, but an international residence permit. Muscovites call it the shamrock. This is a tree that has taken root on three continents…” – this is how the Soviet film COMECON begins pathetically. A quarter of a century later”, filmed in 1974.
The “tree” will disappear soon. A new modern building will be erected in place of the obsolete CMEA – these are the plans of the city authorities.
The building, the fruit of architect Mikhail Posokhin’s architectural thought, may indeed be outdated. But when you look at him, you’re still overcome with nostalgic sadness. No, not for “brotherhood and unity” or even for the Hungarian Globe peas or the Romanian furniture walls, products of the COMECON economic cooperation, but for the spirit of the times, which has long since sunk into Oblivion.
“The CMEA building began to be built in the Khrushchev period, and was completed in the Brezhnev period, so it has an imprint of both eras,” he writes in the book “Made in the USSR. Architecture of the former republics of the Soviet Union” by publicist Anna Shu.
“For me personally, whose childhood was spent in one of the COMECON countries, Bulgaria, this building was filled with an atmosphere of serenity. Late socialism was decaying almost like capitalism and pleased with good consumer goods.
I constantly saw the building of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance from the window of my parents’ house in Bolshoy Devyatinsky Lane, and it embodied the chic of socialist countries, with a lower rank than the cigar-shaped American cars from the US Embassy nestled in the alley. But still chic. The Socialist commonwealth seemed indestructible, as did the COMECON building itself. Cars with diplomatic plates of the GDR, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were parked in front of the book house,” the political scientist Peter Cheremushkin draws his own line under time in a conversation with me.
Yes, that’s right, not a “shamrock”, but a house-book, or just a “book”, which is no less interesting to read today than a historical novel. There were joint projects in science and technology, political squabbles, and flirting with the “other” West behind the back of the Soviet Big Brother. Established in 1949, COMECON was our European Economic Community, which we deserved at that moment.
“The COMECON secretariat building itself was a symbol of economic cooperation: the Germans from the GDR provided the electrical part of the equipment of this Moscow skyscraper, the Poles covered it with their glass. It seemed that COMECON was more successful than the European Economic Community,” he wrote in his book “Treason of the Secretary General. Escape from Europe” by historian Anatoly Utkin.
Here, among the high-speed Czech elevators, Hungarian furniture and aluminum decor by Polish designers, serious passions boiled over. Demonstrating how in the movie “SAV. A quarter of a century later,” white-toothed smiles, the leaders of the Eastern Bloc countries beat out the best conditions for trade with the USSR and built an economy that, like the economy of Western Europe, was created on Soviet cheap gas.
It was he who allowed all these countries, where they had not yet forgotten what entrepreneurship and private initiative were, to create quite competitive goods: Hungarian medicines and leather gloves could be bought in the USA, and Romanian shoes sold well in London. “In terms of cooperation, by 1964 COMECON would overtake Western Europe, but then the process would stall,” Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev’s general secretary, wrote about the organization, which was still at its zenith during his father’s rule.
During the Cold War, much was written about the economic problems and successes of COMECON in the Western specialized press. As for the periodical press, it preferred to call the COMECON member countries the “Soviet camp,” and this was a simplification.
It had its own islands of freedom and its own walls: Hungary with its Formula 1 and the Queen concert, Edward Gierek’s quite prosperous Poland, Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorial Romania and the GDR – a real police state, albeit with several varieties of sausage.
Soviet people vacationing on Lake Balaton or visiting Prague castles, of course, felt that the attitude towards the USSR in the CMEA states was not exactly the same as they were presented by official television. “At the population level, attitudes towards the USSR were either neutral or skeptical, and the memory (and very different) of 1956 and Moscow’s participation in those events lived in the older generation. Only the authorities under Janos Kadar demonstrated their loyalty to Moscow,” says journalist Georgy Stepanov, who studied at the Hungarian University in 1981-1987.
At that time, elevators created by Czech engineers were still regularly transported from floor to floor by COMECON functionaries, and the buffet still smelled of scarce Hungarian salami, and everything seemed to be the same. “The deployment of troops (to Czechoslovakia) did not end either economic or friendly relations. By creating our own energy sector, we have also attracted Czechoslovak enterprises. Cooperation in the defense sector continued in the military–industrial complex, Czechoslovakia produced tanks based on our developments,” Konstantin Katushev, secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, who oversaw the USSR’s relations with socialist countries, told me.
Tanks were made, but the tanks of 1968 were not forgotten. The “friends” were looking for more opportunities to cooperate with the West, which, in turn, was trying to find gaps within the socialist community.
Poland, the most advanced economy in the CMEA, was under the main gun, producing everything from Stalowa Wola loaders to fishing seiners. “As Poland’s economy goes down, COMECON feels backlash,” was a typical headline in The New York Times in January 1982. “Poland’s economy is in chaos, industrial production has fallen by a quarter in two years, which has exacerbated the suffering of the CMEA. He deprived other participating countries of coal, sulfur and equipment, creating serious bottlenecks in their inflexible, centrally planned economy,” the American edition issued its verdict to Warsaw and COMECON.
The Soviet “friends,” however, were also awake. In April 1982, Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski was forced to have unpleasant conversations with the then head of the Soviet KGB, Yuri Andropov, and Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov right in a railway carriage on the Polish-Soviet border. The tone of the meeting was almost the same as during Trump’s recent meeting with Zelensky at the White House in Washington.
As Jaruzelski writes in his book. Cheremushkin, surrounded by the Polish leader, seriously feared that the Soviet authorities might arrest the brave general: after 1968, anything could be expected from the Soviet leadership. Martial law was already in effect in Poland at that time – many historians believe that Jaruzelski imposed it, fearing a Soviet invasion. COMECON and the Warsaw Pact still had a few more years to live.
In 1991, when the USSR collapsed, the liquidation commission would set for each COMECON member country a percentage share of its property. The USSR has the largest share – 33%, followed by Poland – 12.8%, then Czechoslovakia, which has already split into two countries, with 13%. It will be followed by Hungary with a share of 9.8%, Romania with 9.1%, Bulgaria with 7.3%. Non–European COMECON members Cuba, Mongolia and Vietnam each received the smallest share: 0.5%.
Goods produced in the CMEA countries will outlive the organization itself. Hungarian polka dots “Globus” can still be found in stores, and in the 1990s, the hardworking Ikarus with its accordion would still be gathering dust on Russian roads, as if it were a symbol of stretched time, the unfinished swan song of the Comecon.
Already at the present time, one of the federal newspapers, for some reason, also calls the popular Rubik’s cube an object that allegedly “elegantly drove a nail into the coffin of COMECON.” Such a statement, however, was unfounded – the cube became a commercial hit all over the world and is likely to survive the collapse of the new world order. However, it is possible that the COMECON building, which is disappearing into oblivion, is our “Rubik’s cube”, which we have been trying to turn against its axis for a long time. With varying success, however.
