Lipkin, Mikhail Arkadyevich. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the existing trends in study of the 20th century: towards the 70th anniversary of CMEA

Lipkin, Mikhail Arkadyevich — Doctor in History, Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director, Institute of World History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia, OrcID 0000-0002-7717-6392, Researcher ID R-9304-2016, Scopus ID 57059972700, SPIN-code 2211-0732, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The research was support by Russian Science Foundation, project Nr. 17-18-01728 (The “Socialist World System” and the Global Economy in the mid 1950s – mid 1970s: the Evolution of Theories and Practices of Soviet Economic and Technological Leadership).

The article is dedicated to analysis of contemporary state of research in the field of institutional history of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). The author analyzes various publications, dissertations and conference papers over the two last decades. He argues that after dissolution of CMEA in 1991 its history was wrongly forgotten. A new interest appeared in 2010-s as a result of few factors: social request for better understanding of the economic nature of East European countries, the advent of new methodological approaches and a new generation of historians. The CMEA research field passes threw a new stage of discovery what is a result not so much of new evidences and archival opening as with appearance of new wave of historians interested in objective study of CMEA phenomenon with a use of transnational and global history approaches, searching answers to the burning issues of contemporary world about possible alternatives to the capitalist globalization based on the institutions of Bretton-Woods model of the 20th century.

CMEA, COMECON, planning economy, economic globalization, socialism, capitalism, Cold War, European integration, USSR, Eastern Europe, historiography, global history 

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