The Rise of COMECON

Over the smoke-blackened gate of the giant steelworks in the Czech town of Pilsen, two notable emblems stand side by side. One is the world-renowned trademark of the century-old firm of Skoda, a winged arrow in a circle. The other is the red star of Communism. The famed plant that munitioned Central Europe's armies through two world wars is now the Skoda Lenin Works, a smoking, clanging symbol of a bold Russian ambition: to bind together all the productive skills of the seven East European satellites into one Moscow-managed economic community.

The agency driving to build this unheralded rival to Western Europe's powerful six-nation Common Market is the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or COMECON. Founded eleven years ago in Moscow as a crude Stalinist device for milking the satellites for Soviet benefit, COMECON was transformed into some thing more palatable after the 1956 Polish and Hungarian risings had compelled the Russians to pour $1.5 billion in emergency aid into the satellite lands. Communist rulers of the seven satellite nations pledged their peoples' labors to help Nikita Khrushchev overtake and "bury" the capitalist West through a planned ''international division of labor." In Bucharest last week, Nikita Khrushchev crowed: "Obviously the imperialists do not like our cooperation. They would like our countries to be like the team in the well-known fable in which the crayfish is backing, the swan strains toward the sky, and the pike pulls toward the water."

More Rational Ties. Under the revamped plans launched in 1956, the satellite countries were assigned the jobs they could do best. Czechoslovakia, whose giant Skoda works turn out entire sugar mills, oil refineries, and more electric locomotives than any factory in the world, undertook to build machines, tools, heavy electrical equipment. Poland began specializing in coal mining and transport equipment. East Germany set out to concentrate on chemicals, building materials, precision machinery. Hungary was told to concentrate on aluminum processing. Rumania on petroleum production, and Bulgaria, on the sunny Black Sea coast, undertook to become a kind of fourth-class Florida of orchards, vineyards, and resorts for exhausted heroes of Soviet labor.

Soviet Russia, as the all-powerful supplier of the satellites' raw materials, calls all the COMECON tunes. All deals are bilateral, for there is no free exchange of goods in Communism's uncommon market. The Russians have refused to supply raw materials to the Rumanians to build a new truck factory, because COMECON had already designated the Poles as truckmakers.

To get Russian iron ore for their new $1.5 billion steel plant rising at Kosice, the Czechs have had to sign a contract to supply the Russians with mining machinery to help boost Soviet ore production. So prickly, in fact, are the hedges between COMECON partners that in the pipeline network now being laid to carry Volga oil to East German, Czech and Hungarian factories, each country builds and owns the part within its territory. "There is no charity among Communists," says a Czech official. "Business is business."

Less Visible Chains. Because the Soviet Union alone is excused from limiting itself to certain specialties, COMECON is fast binding the satellites to greater dependence on Russia than they knew in Stalin's time. By 1965 Russia's share of Czech foreign trade will rise from a third to more than half.

COMECON claims that all Eastern economies are growing faster than those of Western Europe. They should, because they started from so much farther back. And they still have a long way to go, though the Reds sometimes sally spectacularly at economic targets of opportunity, e.g., when Russia tries to capture Nasser's economy by offering to build the billion-dollar Aswan Dam for him. Communist-bloc imports and exports still make up less than 10% of world trade.

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