The Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Moment in the Global Debt Crisis of the 1980s
In the spring of 1973, Chase Manhattan Bank opened an office in Moscow at No. 1 Karl Marx Square in the Metropole Hotel. In so doing, it became the first American bank to maintain an office in the Soviet Union since 1922. By the end of the year, First National City Bank and Bank of America had opened offices in Moscow as well. For the banks, as well as other American businesses, the motivation for expansion was simple. “The Soviet Union is the last great undeveloped market for the U.S,” Alfred Wentworth, the Chase banker who ran the Moscow office, told the Wall Street Journal.[1]
1973 was also the high tide of détente between the American and Soviet governments. The previous year, US President Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev had completed a historic summit meeting in Moscow, and signed a treaty committing their nations to greater economic cooperation. Amidst the thaw in political tensions, the American business community saw a unique opportunity for expansion.
This paper will trace the history of the American business community’s growing interest in expansion into communist states. It will argue that political détente lifted the taboo on doing business with communist states, and businesses quickly leapt at the opportunity to exploit underdeveloped socialist markets. As business between the Eastern and Western blocs expanded in the 1970s, this paper will ultimately argue that the Cold War became a privatized conflict, carried out as much by private actors in the global marketplace as by public actors in the international community of nation-states.
[1] Ray Vicker, “Americans Go to Moscow to Talk Business and Find That the Russians are Receptive,” Wall Street Journal (Aug. 8, 1973), p. 34.
See more of: AHA Sessions