The adoption of the “Comprehensive Programme for the Further Extension and Improvement of Cooperation and the Development of Socialist Economic Integration by the CMEA Member-Countries,” to quote the document’s full title, opens a new chapter in the history of the self-styled “Socialist Commonwealth.” Two years on the drawing board, the 25,000-word encyclical is a strange mixture of ideological clichés, abstract formulations of political, economic, and juridical desiderata, projections of distant ends, references to proximate objectives, and elaborations of the concrete ways and means by which the next plateau on the road to the Communist millenium shall be reached. Approved at the 26th session of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) which met July 27-29, 1971, and subsequently ratified by the top political organs of the member states, the program enjoys locally the formal status of a multilateral treaty whose principles validly bind the CMEA partners to a general code of conduct aimed at achieving certain select goals by various designated methods. At the same time it represents a theoretical blueprint of how the leaderships of the countries concerned would like the region’s economic organism to perform in an optimal setting and how they propose to bring that situation about.
