Four Decades of Soviet Economic Assistance: Superpower Economic Competition in the Developing World

For more than four decades the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in a global competition for influence and power. Military alliances, arms races, espionage, propaganda campaigns, arms transfers to allies and to client states and movements, support for revolutionary and counterrevolutionary groups, as well as economic assistance and economic development projects were all part of the arsenal used by the two countries in this global confrontation. The purpose was, in part, to pursue the creation of a world supportive of and modeled after either the Soviet Union or the United States. The present essay focuses on one of those instruments, the economic and development assistance programs for what were then termed ???Third World??? states, as established and employed by one of the global protagonists, the Soviet Union, from the immediate post-Stalin period until the disintegration of the Soviet state itself in December 1991. The purpose of the essay is to track and explain the evolution of and the changes in those programs throughout the cold war, in order to determine their place in the Soviet competition for global influence with the United States.published or submitted for publicationnot peer reviewe