In 1971 the Soviet bloc's Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) created the International Investment Bank (IIB). The IIB was part of a broader effort to adopt market-based reforms in all the East-bloc economies. The bank was designed to promote competition for loans and rigorous vetting of projects, ostensibly resulting in greater CMEA integration and production that met world standards of quality. But this scenario ultimately did not pan out. Instead, the IIB became a mere conduit for Western finance, focusing not on high technology but on natural resource extraction, particularly the construction of the Soyuz natural gas pipeline. More fundamentally, the IIB could not function properly without market-determined prices and convertible currencies. Although economic authorities in the Soviet bloc fully recognized the constraints on the IIB, they were unwilling to abandon fundamental principles of the Soviet economic system.

Historical accounts of the Cold War usually relegate the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to footnotes, if they acknowledge the GATT at all. This article examines the impact of the Cold War on the institutional development of GATT, showing how geopolitical considerations influenced decisions about whether to grant membership in GATT to Communist and non-aligned countries. The accession debates in GATT also reveal the multicentered dynamic of the Western alliance, exposing a variety of views about whether the Cold War was a battle to be waged or a condition of global international relations to be accepted. But if the GATT could not evade the Cold War, its secretariat also manipulated Cold War circumstances, beliefs, and priorities to strengthen the institution. The result of the GATT accession debates was to reposition the GATT as a forum and instrument of the Western alliance, rather than the universal organization it was supposed to be, and to impart new meaning to the process of liberalizing world trade.

Indonesia was one of the first developing countries to receive Soviet aid on a large scale. Declassified Soviet and East German archival sources, which illuminate the discussions and other interactions of government leaders and Communist party officials, diplomats, and experts from the two sides, greatly enrich our understanding of this important case of Nikita Khrushchev's ambitious policy in the Third World. This article presents for the first time detailed, reliable information about the amount, composition, and goals of Soviet aid to Indonesia during the Khrushchev era. A close analysis of this case contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms of the global Cold War, which deeply affected center and periphery alike.