The U.S.S.R. is only one part of the Soviet bloc, albeit the center of power. The U.S.S.R. accounts for about 30 percent of the trade which the European Soviet bloc carries on with the free world. (The percentage would be still less if Communist China were included, but Communist China will be discussed in another chapter.) In other words, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, the Soviet zone of Germany, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Albania, despite the long, steady decline of their trade with the free world ever since "sovietization" took hold in about 1948, still exchange about twice as much merchandise with free-world countries as does the U.S.S.R. These satellites, or some of them, have long had trade agreements with countries in Western Europe. During the last year or so they have renewed about 45 of those. In addition they renewed about a dozen agreements with non-European countries. The brand-new agreements which the satellites concluded in Europe were mainly with France and Greece, thus conforming to the Soviet pattern of increased attention to those two countries. But in other respects the satellite trade pattern was different from that of the U.S.S.R., for while recent U.S.S.R. commitments, if fulfilled, seem to indicate increased trade, there was no evidence of a reversal in the long slide of the East-West trade of the satellites. Therefore one could not ignore the possibility that the U.S.S.R., with a flourishing of fountain pens and a blare of trumpets, was merely shifting to itself a bigger percentage of all bloc trade with the rest of the world. Now let's see what kinds of goods are involved in the new trade agreements and other commitments that the U.S.S.R. has been making. =More Consumer Goods Ordered= Consumer goods, the items about which Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Mikoyan made such a fanfare in announcing the new course for the Soviet domestic economy, make up one class of commodities, though not the most important, that the U.S.S.R. has been ordering from the Western world. It appears that the U.S.S.R. has committed itself to buy consumer goods at a somewhat brisker rate than in recent years. Most of these consumer goods were food items. During the last 6 months of 1953 and the first month of 1954, the known Soviet arrangements to buy food from the free world amounted to about $90 million. Some of the deliveries were scheduled in 1953, some in 1954. Butter was the biggest item. In trade agreements and contracts, butter quotas amounted to 37,500 tons, with an estimated value of $40 million. Denmark was to provide about $18.6 million of this. The second most important source of butter was to be the Netherlands, with $13.7 million. Lesser amounts were to come from New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, and Uruguay. Meat quotas came to about $22 million, with Denmark and Argentina the leading suppliers. Smaller amounts were to come from the Netherlands, Uruguay, and other countries.