MOSCOW ON PARIS
By G. B. THOMAS SO far as Moscow is concerned the Paris Conference on the Marshall programme has been moving steadily towards what lzvestia calls a "sad ending." Ever since M. Molotov's angry departure from Paris Moscow propagandists have been telling their audience that nothing but evil can come out of the conference. During the past two or three weeks their tone has become shriller and more abusive. In the few days before what was expected to be the final plenary session on September 15th it rose to a harsh and overpowering crescendo. This spate of abusive warnings is, of course, intended for those East European countries whose Govern- ments were not allowed to take part in the conference and which have therefore, for the present at least, cut themselves oft from American help. As the crisis mounts in Eastern Europe the tempta- tion to look westwards must be growing steadily stronger. It is against this dangerous tendency that the Soviet Government is now fighting. Its propagandists are trying to prove two things. First of all that the Marshall offer is a delusion and a snare. If it means anything at all—and that is very doubtful-Lit means the enslave- ment of Europe by American capitalism and imperialism, with Britain getting a handsome rake-off for acting as the agent of Wall Street. So much for the negative side. More positively, Moscow propa- gandists have to prove that the Soviet Union is in a far better position to give disinterested help to the countries of Europe than the United States, whose economy is hovering on the brink of a catastrophic depression.
The second argument is more important than the first, since most of the countries of Eastern Europe are in a very critical condition, badly need help and would welcome it from almost any source. That is why the Soviet Government acted so quickly in the matter of a trade agreement with Czechoslovakia. In so far as it was intended to impress other needy countries with the advantages of Soviet friendship it was a first-class piece of poliiical warfare. In Czechoslovakia the year's harvest will be about 40 per cent, below normal, and bread rations will have to be cut. Coal production has fallen off, and a special drive is being made to get man-power into the mines. Electric power consumption has had to be cur- tailed : its domestic use between 7 a.m. and 1 p.m. is forbidden (except for cooking) ; and industries are to refrain from using it for one day out of seven.
In Poland the harvest prospects are nor very favourable. A great deal of the winter-sown wheat was lost, and it has been officially announced that a mixture of rye and barley flour will have to be used for bread. It is feared that the shortage of grains may have very serious consequences on the livestock programme. Rumania has once again appealed to Moscow for grain. The farmers are be- ing dragooned into making compulsory deliveries of their produce, and the more familiar forms of peasant sabotage of Government direction are very much in evidence. How far the shortage in the towns is due to the demands of the Soviet occupation forces is still unknown. But it was a very important factor in last year's scarcity. In Yugoslavia the wheat outlook is better than it was last year, although Marshal Tito has himself admitted that it was poor "in certain localities." But the country has embarked upon a very ambitious scheme of industrialisation whose success within the five- year period allowed for it depends upon outside help. All these needy countries were forced to reject the prospect of American aid. They are now on Moscow's doorstep.
So Russia must at all costs give an impression of her great
strength ; the success of her policy depends upon it. The Czech trade - -reement and the others that followed it, and the way the Anglo-Soviet trade talks were allowed to break down, are all calcu- lated to create that impression of economic strength. But what is the reality behind this ald façade ? Has Russia really recovered so far from the awful devastation of the war that she can afford to give extensive economic help to the countries of Eastern Europe ? We are told that Russian deliveries of grain- to Czechoslovakia have already started. Some 2oo,000 tons were promised. This certainly
gives the impression that the goods are there and also the transport to carry them to their destination. But the fact remains that these first deliveries have not come from the Soviet Union at all. They have come from Hungary. All that has happened is that Hungarian reparat:on deliveries to the Soviet Union have been diverted to Czechoslovakia.
But this is only an isolated instance. We shall get a clearer pic- ture of the position if we look at the bases of Soviet economic strength —coal, electrical power and agriculture, and the houses to shelter
the workers engaged in them. The State Planning Commission, it is true, has reported that the five7year plan as a whole is doing well, and that for the second quarter of this year it was fulfilled by 103 per cent. But this rosy picture does not stand up to critical examination. "The coal industry," says lzvestia," is lagging behind. It is retarding the development of heavy industry, the railway services and the national economy as a whole." Mechanisation is inadequate. Delayed housing programmes are making it impossible to work new coal mines. "Fuel reserves at the power-stations," wrote Pravda on August 6th, "are less than half of the quantities planned for July 15th. The transport of Donetz coal by railway is particularly unsatisfactory. A number of stations in the east have not been supplied with coal from the Kuznetsk basin. This situation, if it is not put right at once, may interfere with the normal work of industry in winter." Pravda also criticises the Ministries concerned for their slowness in putting up new power-stations.
Nor is the housing programme doing well. "The second quarter of the year is nearly over," wrote Pravda on June 26th, " but it is evident that the housing programme is not being fulfilled. . . . In Sverdlovsk, for instance, the building plan was fulfilled by only 12.3 per cent, during the first four months of the year. In the Urals, Siberia and the Far East, in place of the many thousands of houses to be completed this year, only a few hundreds have been built. Why has the brickworks at Novosibirsk fulfilled its plan by only one-third ? . . . Machinery is badly used and productivity is low. . . . There has been a failure to deliver 58 million bricks." As regards agriculture, although in general the prospects are far better than they were last year, Pravda had this to say on July 26th about the harvest in the Ukraine: "The speed of harvesting does not yet secure the timely collection of the harvest and the avoidance of grain losses. . . . Combine harvesting is particularly unsatisfactory." Collective farms in the Kiev area are said to be falling far behind their schedule of deliveries.
It would be dangerous to draw hard-and-fast conclusions from this scrappy evidence. But we are certainly entitled to ask whether the picture of Soviet strength that Moscow's propagandists are draw- ing for foreign consumption is not grossly exaggerated. In view of the Czech and Rumanian requests for grain, and possible Yugoslav demands also, it is difficult to see how the Soviet Government could have carried out a commitment to supply the United Kingdom with one million tons of grain in 1947. Yet that was the figure men- tioned in the Anglo-Soviet trade negotiations. Nor is it easy to see how Russia could have shipped substantial supplies of timber—in view of the lag in the Russian housing programme, and in view also of the shortage of skilled lumber-jacks. The fact that the Anglo-Soviet talks were allowed to get that far may well have been a gigantic piece of bluff—a bluff designed to prove to the world that Russia had the goods, and could deliver them, if only the West would take them. But the West refuses to be reasonable. Pravda on July 20th still found it necessary to remind its readers that the Soviet Union is "building Communism under conditions of capitalist encirclement."
So all Moscow's propaganda against the Marshall plan may well be a sign of weakness—and not a demonstration of strength. When we watch the storm clouds gather over Western Europe, we must not forget that the signs of crisis in Eastern Europe are even more palpable. And the outlook is far less promising. For the countries of Eastern Europe have been forced to rely utterly on the Soviet Union, a Power that is itself in the throes of serious economic diffi- culties. Western Europe has at least the assurance that there is nothing wrong with the productive machine on the American Continent.
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