Originally from The Journal of Eurasian Law (JEL)

December 2012 witnessed the most recent incident in a long running series of tit-for-tat provocations and retaliations that has characterized Russian-U.S. economic relations for most of the past century. However, in the new globalized economy embodied in the World Trade Organization, of which both the Russian Federation and the U.S. are members, trade sanctions imposed as a result of political disputes are no longer permissible, so the arena(s) in which these conflicts are fought has moved on to the granting (or withholding) of entry visas, seizure of assets, and the adoption of orphans. The bulk of this issue of the Journal of Eurasian Law is devoted to presenting the basic documents relating to this most recent conflict.

In the decades following World War II, trade relations between the United States and the U.S.S.R. were subject to interruption and distortion as sanctions were imposed as a result of underlying political disputes. Included among these incidents were the 1980 decision by the Carter Administration to institute an embargo on grain exports to the Soviet Union and a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, followed in 1981 by a ban on certain high-tech exports to the U.S.S.R. and U.S. participation in the construction of a Soviet gas pipeline to Western Europe by the new Reagan administration in response to Soviet participation in the imposition of martial law in Poland.

The most significant and certainly the longest-lasting trade sanction imposed by the United States on the U.S.S.R. was the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, originally adopted in 1974 as an amendment to the Trade Act of 1974. Proposed by Senator Henry M. Jackson and Representative Charles Vanik, the legislation prohibited the extension of most-favored nation trade status and certain other trade benefits to nations with nonmarket economies that did not permit its citizens the right or opportunity to emigrate freely. A similar provision was also attached by Congress to the Export-Import Bank Act. Jackson and Vanik proposed their legislation in response to the adoption by the Soviet government of a tax on emigrants that made it more difficult for Soviet Jews to leave the U.S.S.R.