Summary: The author presents an overview of the assessments of Eastern Bloc relations in Russian historiography over the past thirty years, comparing them with the ones of Bulgarian and Western historiography. The emphasis is laid on the ideas of the world socialist system, one of the cornerstones of which was the COMECON. The works of Mikhail Lipkin and his colleagues from the Institute of World History on the relations in the COMECON in 1949–1979 are analysed in detail as an attempt to create and operate an “alternative globalist project for world order”. Together with the confirmation that the COMECON was a dynamic system in which Eastern European members were active actors defending their national interests (as young Western European researchers of the second decade of the 21st century prove in their research), Russian authors show that these members benefited from the integration trends.
Keywords: Eastern Bloc, COMECON, socialist economic integration, alternative global¬ization
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