Administration for Soviet Property in Austria

USIA operated as a de facto state corporation and controlled over four hundred expropriated Austrian factories, transportation and trading companies.

USIA assets included formerly independent Austrian companies (ÖAF), factories once owned by German corporations (AEG) and former SS enterprises (DEST).

Dismantling continued until the early summer of 1946, when the Soviet policy changed from taking Austrian assets to managing them for a profit.

[8] Austrian government was forced to accept the fact but refused to legalize the expropriations through records in land and corporate registers.

A different source named 160 enterprises in 1954 (excluding the oil fields, transportation companies and trading outlets).

[2] The strikes of the 1950s were powered by organized pro-communist workers of the USIA factories in the Soviet sector of Vienna.

Portisch wrote that Moscow intervened to defuse the situation and denied support to Austrian Communists.

It routinely disregarded and evaded Austrian taxes and its trucking arm engaged in outright smuggling.

[20] USIA products easily moved across the Iron Curtain and could be sold at a profit and below fair market prices inside Austria.

USIA retail shops in Vienna traded below market and were frequented by many Americans of modest means.

[22] Soviet rule over the economy of Eastern Austria left a deep and lasting impression on the Austrians.

The 1958 "Final Report" on USIA activities concluded that the sole purpose of USIA was "to exploit Austria's natural and human resources as possibly and systematically as possible ... exploitation in colonial style amid a highly developed European economy, the extent and economic success of which are astounding ...