Technology and Soviet Foreign Trade: On the Political Economy of an Underdeveloped Superpower

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Abstract
This paper investigates how the USSR's trade in foreign technologies reflects its position as an ‘underdeveloped superpower’ within the capitalist world-economy. As a part of the world-system, the Soviet Union's political economy is reconceptualized here, using Wallerstein's world-systems theory, as the most core-like semi-peripheral economy in the world capitalist system. These concepts are used to explain how the Soviet economy has successfully escaped the networks of ‘financial-industrial’ dependency that characterized the Tsarist economy, while, at the same time, becoming caught in a new kind of ‘technological-industrial’ dependency in many areas of advanced technological production. Even though basic Soviet science is very sophisticated, the investigation concludes that political contradictions within the Soviet state and economic policies based upon the USSR's essentially semi-peripheral niche prevent Soviet producers from generating the industrial and technological infrastructure of a more highly developed superpower.

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