L. Fituni, I. Abramova Resource Potential of Africa and Russia's ...

have been recalculated on the basis of different parity, or even in
accordance with the USSR State bank exchange rate for national
currencies of African countries.
It was not a rare case that Moscow would “make a gift” of unused
military reserves (it could be armaments, tanks, trucks, etc.)
whose time of warehouse conservation expired or which became
morally old. Those would be fully functioning, unused items (say,
cannon shells, or mortars, kept somewhere in East Germany) whose
utilization or even transportation to utilization factories in Siberia
would have been more costly than selling them at a huge discount
and on long term credit terms, or, sometimes, as mentioned above,
even offering them as a gift. Such practices were not limited to military
hardware either, but would include many export items of Soviet-made
machinery or means of transportation.
The complex system of multiple exchange rates and parities
should not create an impression that the calculations were totally
subjective and had no economic foundations under them. Unfortunately,
with time technical “foreign currency” specialists of the Soviet
system pass away and in some cases with them disappears the
true knowledge about how, why and on what basis this or that calculation
had been done, or even the methodologies of such calculations.
Besides this, after the demise of the Soviet Union, the new liberal
authorities were not too keen on making the precise figures
from Soviet ledges and account books known to outsiders. Within a
number of years a significant part of former Soviet claims on the
Third world countries were sold at discount, first to a number of favored
intermediaries, who then resold them at premium on secondary
debt markets. This was allegedly the fate of parts of Ghanaian,
Ugandan, South Yemeni and other liabilities to the USSR.
The sellers were companies with access to the first Ye.Gaidar
government of Russian Federation. The buyers were often sham
companies working in the interest of major western financial groups
and transnational banks. The looted property of the former Soviet
Union later became the foundation capital of newly emerging private
commercial banks in democratic Russia. Some of those banks
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