This ministry maintained control over the planning and operation of foreign trade through main administrations for imports and exports and for certain large geographical areas, as well as through foreign-trade corporations holding monopolies for specific commodities or services.
[1] The State Committee for Foreign Economic Relations (Russian: Gosudarstvennyi komitet po vneshnim ekonomicheskim sviaziam — GKES), created in 1955, managed all foreign aid programs and the export of complete factories through the FTOs subordinate to it.
Certain ministries, however, had the right to deal directly with foreign partners through their own FTOs.
[2] On January 17, 1988, Izvestia reported the abolition of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and GKES.
The government retained its monopoly on foreign trade through a streamlined version of the Soviet foreign trade bureaucracy as it existed before the January 17 decree.