Cracks in the Ice

After five ballets, three state dinners and a liver-taxing marathon of vodka toasts to Soviet-American friendship, Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans and his aides arrived home last week, hopeful that their mission to Moscow would help open a new millennium of trade between the two superpowers. While Stans was busy gaining five pounds from eleven days of Russian hospitality, Soviet-American commerce was likewise growing heftier.

A group of American firms, including United States Steel Corp., signed contracts to sell $65 million worth of ore-mining and oil-drilling equipment to the Russians in return for $60 million worth of Soviet nonferrous metals. Two weeks earlier, the Commerce Department had approved export licenses for American firms to ship $528 million worth of heavy equipment intended for the Soviet Union's new Kama River truck factory. Meanwhile, the Nixon Administration announced the sale of $130 million worth of corn and other cattle "feed to the Russians.

The trade developments, though not directly related to the Stans visit or to each other, were nonetheless all products of a new American enthusiasm for doing business with the Soviets. The purpose of Stans' "fact-finding" trip was to find out in general ways what the Soviets want from the U.S. and are prepared to give in return. In an excursion arranged months before Stans' mis sion last week, 90 U.S. executives were in Moscow conferring with Soviet trade officials and industrial managers. Said William J. Barton, vice president of Business International, the research firm that sponsored the Moscow expedition: "There's a real thaw--you can almost hear the ice cracking."

Drop in the Samovar. The cracks are still narrow. In 1970 the U.S. sold $118 million worth of goods to the Soviets, mostly hides, pulp, aluminum oxides and machinery. In return, Americans imported $72 million in Russian goods, principally sable skins, fuels, aluminum scrap, chrome ore and other metals. That was a mere drop in the samovar for the Soviet Union, which does about $5 billion worth of business a year with other non-Communist countries.

Stans told his Russian hosts that the trade trickle could swell tenfold by the mid-1970s to $2 billion, a figure that analysts in his own Commerce Department find a bit too heroic. There are about as many obstacles to increased trade as there are to an agreement to limit strategic arms. The Soviets dearly want American high-technology goods, like computers and machine tools. Aside from natural gas and metals, however, they have little of compelling interest to offer American customers. Russian mining officials hope to entice American firms to help them exploit some of the huge Siberian copper deposits. But a joint venture--perhaps modeled after Fiat's partnership with Russia in the Togliatti auto plant--would require as much as $4 billion in American investment capital.

Least Favored Nation. The U.S. Government has been reluctant to offer credit to the Soviets, and they consider that lack to be the biggest block to increased trade. Congress this year gave President Nixon the power to extend to Russia the same Export-Import Bank financing terms now enjoyed by many U.S. trading partners. Last week the President extended Export-Import Bank privileges to Rumania, ending a three-year ban on U.S. credit to Communist-bloc nations. But Nixon has given no clues as to when such financing will actually be granted to Russia, if ever.

The U.S. has also been reluctant to approve a Soviet request for "most-favored nation" status, a move that would make tariffs on Russian products no higher than the lowest levies applied to America's other trading partners. On caviar, for example, M.F.N. status would mean a tariff of 18% instead of 30% .

The Russians appear eager to follow up the Stans mission with some probing of their own. A six-man delegation led by the Minister of Agriculture will tour the U.S. next week to examine American farm products for possible export to the Soviet Union. And a high-level mission is expected to land in Washington early next year in hopes of working out the first official Soviet-American trade agreement since 1951.

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