These highly strategic items, of course, are the ones which the countries of the Soviet empire have wanted most of all. And when not able to get them legally, they have continued their efforts to get them illegally. The third semiannual Battle Act report, _World-Wide Enforcement of Strategic Trade Controls_, contained a detailed account of the underground trade that violates Western regulations. Since all foreign trade of a Soviet-bloc country is a state monopoly, it follows that the state is an active participant in this underground traffic. With the bloc, circumvention is an official policy. The Soviet Union, despite its publicized buying of consumer goods--which have never been restricted by the free world--has definitely not slackened its efforts to obtain industrial goods whether strategic or nonstrategic in nature. =Something Different in Soviet Exports= As told in chapter I of this report, the economic planners of the Soviet empire first figure out their import requirements and then decide what they want to export in order to pay for the imports. They look upon exports primarily as a means of obtaining goods which are more advantageous to import than to produce, or which they cannot produce. In the present chapter, we have seen what sort of items they are currently interested in importing. Now we turn the coin over and look at the export side. The most noticeable feature is that the U.S.S.R. in the last half of 1953 and the early part of 1954 introduced into free-world markets a number of mineral products which they had not sold in such quantities for some years. These commodities included manganese, petroleum, and gold. All of them at one time or another have been among the major Soviet exports. Together with grain, timber, and furs, they make up the principal means that the U.S.S.R. possesses to procure the imports they want. Why have the mineral exports been revived at this time? This leads us to the grain situation. Grain has long been the Soviet Union's No. 1 export commodity, and still is. But Soviet grain shipments declined precipitately in 1953. The United Kingdom, usually the main Western customer for this commodity, stopped buying grain on a government-to-government basis and turned the purchasing over to private firms. At the same time the U.S.S.R. apparently decided to keep more of its grain stores at home. The efforts to furnish more fodder to livestock, together with below-average crops and collective-farm headaches in the U.S.S.R. and satellites, suggest the motivation for this. At any rate the private British firms were unenthusiastic about signing large contracts at the high prices set by the U.S.S.R., and grain shipments to the United Kingdom skidded from $101 million in 1952 to only $10.1 million in 1953.