When in 1918 the Soviet government established the first complete State monopoly of foreign trade, whereby that government should become the purchaser of all goods imported into the vast territories of former Tsarist Russia, and the distributor of all materials and products grown or manufactured within those territories, the outside world hesitated for several years to reopen trade dealings with the new State. It feared and distrusted this new commercial colossus, which on the one hand could become, in theory at least, the largest single buyer in the world of the goods it needed, and on the other, a seller that could, again in theory, break any competitor in the world market, by the mere process of offering at any price the materials it could produce in such abundance.