The picture for the USSR was somewhat similar. In the years 1945-50 it pillaged Eastern Europe, removing plant and equipment wholesale from East Germany and Romania, and forced the region as a whole to accept prices below world market levels for goods going to the USSR proper.52 But even in that period the economic gains from this must have been substantially less than the escalation of the USSR's arms budget once the Cold War had well and truly begun. And from 1955 onwards fear of rebellion in Eastern Europe led the Soviet government to relax the direct economic pressure on its satellites.
The imperialism which necessitated arms spending was not that of a single empire in which a few "finance capitalists" at the centre made huge super-profits by holding billions of people down. Rather it was the imperialism of rival empires, in which the combined capitalists of each ruling class had to divert funds from productive investments to military expenditure in order to ensure that they hung on to what they already possessed.
The calculation in both Washington and Moscow was simple. To relax the level of military spending was to risk losing strategic superiority to the rival imperialism, enabling it to extend its sphere of dominance. So the Russians lived in fear of an attempted US "rollback" of Eastern Europe, which would have broken these economies from the USSR's grasp, leading in turn to the possibility of an unravelling of the ties which bound the other constituent parts of the USSR to its Russian centre (something that did in fact happen eventually with the great economic and political crisis that shook the whole Eastern bloc in the years 1 989 to 1991). At the same time, the US feared for its hegemony. As one US spokesman put it at the time of the Korean War, "Were either of the two critical areas on the borders of the
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