[6] According to the Soviet view the "Anglo-American bloc" and "American monopolists ... whose interests had nothing in common with those of the European people" had spurned east–west collaboration within the framework agreed within the United Nations, that is, through the Economic Commission for Europe.

[5] In any event, proposals for a customs union and economic integration of Central and Eastern Europe date back at least to the Revolutions of 1848 (although many earlier proposals had been intended to stave off the Russian and/or communist "menace")[5] and the state-to-state trading inherent in centrally planned economies required some sort of coordination: otherwise, a monopolist seller would face a monopsonist buyer, with no structure to set prices.

After pushing aside Nikolai Voznesensky's technocratic, price-based approach (see further discussion below), the direction appeared to be toward a coordination of national economic plans, but with no coercive authority from Comecon itself.

This radically weakened intellectual property rights, making each country's technologies available to the others for a nominal charge that did little more than cover the cost of documentation.

This, naturally, benefited the less industrialized Comecon countries, and especially the technologically lagging Soviet Union, at the expense of East Germany and Czechoslovakia and, to a lesser extent, Hungary and Poland.

Comecon as an organization proved unable to develop multilateralism mainly because of issues related to domestic planning that encouraged autarky and, at best, bilateral exchanges.

In the early 1950s, all Comecon countries had adopted relatively autarkic policies; now they began again to discuss developing complementary specialties, and in 1956, ten permanent standing committees arose, intended to facilitate coordination in these matters.

The Polish protests and Hungarian uprising led to major social and economic changes, including the 1957 abandonment of the 1956–60 Soviet five-year plan, as the Comecon governments struggled to reestablish their legitimacy and popular support.

[17] The next few years saw a series of small steps toward increased trade and economic integration, including the introduction of the "convertible rouble [ru]", revised efforts at national specialization, and a 1959 charter modeled after the 1957 Treaty of Rome.

After the "special" council session of April 1969 and the development and adoption (in 1971) of the Comprehensive Program for the Further Extension and Improvement of Cooperation and the Further Development of Socialist Economic Integration by Comecon Member Countries, Comecon activities were officially termed integration (equalization of "differences in relative scarcities of goods and services between states through the deliberate elimination of barriers to trade and other forms of interaction").

[3][25] While such integration was to remain a goal, and while Bulgaria became yet more tightly integrated with the Soviet Union, progress in this direction was otherwise continually frustrated by the national central planning prevalent in all Comecon countries, by the increasing diversity of its members (which by this time included Mongolia and would soon include Cuba) and by the "overwhelming asymmetry" and resulting distrust between the many small member states and the Soviet "superstate" which, in 1983, "accounted for 88 percent of Comecon's territory and 60 percent of its population.

"[26] In this period, there were some efforts to move away from central planning, by establishing intermediate industrial associations and combines in various countries (which were often empowered to negotiate their own international deals).

While doubtless "(Central and) East Europeans resented having to defray some of the costs of developing the economy of their hated overlord and oppressor,"[28] they benefited from low prices for fuel and other mineral products.

However, many undertakings based on Western technology were less than successful (for example, Poland's Ursus tractor factory did not do well with technology licensed from Massey Ferguson); other investment was wasted on luxuries for the party elite, and most Comecon countries ended up indebted to the West when capital flows died out as détente faded in the late 1970s, and from 1979 to 1983, all of Comecon experienced a recession from which (with the possible exceptions of East Germany and Bulgaria) they never recovered in the Communist era.

The Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined the EU in 2004, followed by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 and Croatia in 2013.

To date, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany (former GDR), Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia are now members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

In the late 1950s, a number of communist-ruled non-member countries – the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Mongolia, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia – were invited to participate as observers in Comecon sessions.

Although the Cominform was disbanded in 1956, interparty links continued to be strong among Comecon members, and all participated in periodic international conferences of communist parties.

Comecon provided a mechanism through which its leading member, the Soviet Union, sought to foster economic links with and among its closest political and military allies.

In strict economic terms, barter inevitably harmed countries whose goods would have brought higher prices in the free market or whose imports could have been obtained more cheaply and benefitted those for whom it was the other way around.

However, with the August 1948 death of Andrei Zhdanov, Voznesensky lost his patron and was soon accused of treason as part of the Leningrad Affair; within two years he was dead in prison.

[41] This lack of either rationality or international central planning tended to promote autarky in each Comecon country because none fully trusted the others to deliver goods and services.

Most Western commentators have viewed this as implicit, politically motivated subsidization of shaky economies to defuse discontent and reward compliance with Soviet wishes.

[46]: 41  Within the socialist economic paradigm, the subsidies in favor of Cuba and other underdeveloped Comecon members were viewed as rational and fair because they counteracted unequal exchange.

The train was a state-of-the-art project, capable of moving underground or on the surface using standard rails, had a high number of passenger seats, and was lightweight.

The Comecon plan, though more profitable for the Soviets, if less resourceful for the Czechs and Slovaks, forced the Czechoslovak government to buy trains "Ečs (81–709)" and "81-71", both of which were designed in early 1950s and were heavy, unreliable and expensive.

Prime ministers usually headed the delegations, which met during the second quarter of each year in a member country's capital (the location of the meeting was determined by a system of rotation based on Cyrillic script).

[3] The six interstate conferences (on water management, internal trade, legal matters, inventions and patents, pricing, and labor affairs) served as forums for discussing shared issues and experiences.

[49] Writing in 1988, Brown stated that many people in both the West and the East had assumed that a trade and efficiency approach was what Comecon was meant to pursue, which might make it an international trade system more like the EEC, and that some economists in Hungary and Poland had advocated such an approach in the 1970s and 1980s, but that "it would need a transformation of every [Eastern Bloc] economy along Hungarian lines [i.e., only partly centrally planned] to enable a market-guided Comecon to work.

"[49] Although Comecon was loosely referred to as the "European Economic Community (EEC) of (Central and) Eastern Europe," important contrasts existed between the two organizations.