Armand Hammer and the Development of American-Soviet Trade and Economic Relations in the 1970s and 1980s

Armand Hammer was a unique figure in the history of Soviet-American relations. As a witness to various historical eras, from the New Economic Policy to Perestroika, he made a significant contribution to the development of bilateral economic and later cultural ties over several decades. This article explores Hammer's role in the economic cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the last two decades of the Cold War. In the 1970s, an important component of détente was the development of trade, economic, scientific and technical ties between the two countries, which provided the conditions for Hammer to launch several projects in the Soviet Union at once. The main focus of the article is on two of them — the most successful and large-scale (a compensation deal for the construction of a complex of facilities for the production, storage and transportation of mineral fertilizers with subsequent mutual supplies of chemical products) and a large-scale but unsuccessful (plans for the development of oil and gas fields offshore Sakhalin and Yakutia). Based on the analysis of documents from the Russian archives (RGAE, RGANI, GARF), sources of personal origin, documents from the U. S. Department of State, the American and Soviet press, the development of these projects and the reasons for their success or failure are shown. The author concludes that despite the uniqueness of Hammer's biography and the unique style of his work, using the example of a businessman in the USSR, one can identify a number of stable characteristics of Soviet-American economic cooperation characteristic of the entire period as a whole: the pragmatism of the parties, the dependence of the development of economic contacts on political conditions, the complexity of the “docking” of different economic systems, the unconditional priority of short-term commercial benefits in the activities of American businessmen over the possibilities of deep scientific and technical cooperation between the parties.