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

Abstract

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.