Russia's New Policy of Cooperation with International Financial Institutions A Systematic Approach

摘要

With the relative political and economic stability that has been achieved in Russia at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we need to rethink the cooperation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank that took shape in the 1990s and evaluate opportunities for expanding cooperation with other international financial institutions. The conflict of two systems, capitalism and socialism, prevented the Soviet Union from participating in international financial institutions. Although the Soviet Union was one of forty-five participants in the 1944 international financial conference at Bretton Woods ([New Hampshire,] United States), the government did not ratify the charters of the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, or World Bank) for ideological reasons, due to the dominant role of the United States as the main shareholder of these institutions. Together with other countries of the former socialist system, the Soviet Union created special interstate financial institutions: the International Bank for Economic Cooperation (IBEC) and the International Investment Bank (IIB), the international status of which was secured by intergovernmental agreements registered with the UN Secretariat. Soviet participation in the IBEC and IIB was designed to solve economic and political problems and to help develop the national economy. However, it also served to isolate the countries of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), retard their integration into the international economy, and separate the "socialist camp" from the main international monetary and financial institutions.