I feel sorry for Academician Varga ; I think he
has had bad luck. On December 4th he wrote for Pravda an article on " Inflation and Currency Reform in Capitalist Countries." At the time it seemed to the Editor a good, perhaps even a brilliant article, but this week Pravda takes him severely to task for being fooled by British official.' statistics (" which are nit worth a brass farthing ") and for "com- pletely overlooking the question of inflation in Britain." Varga is another victim of what Mihailovitch called " the gale of the world." Since he wrote his article Russia has tried her own hand at currency reform. The devaluation of the rouble and the abolition of ration- ing felt wonderful at first, but after a few days the shops were emptied and at the moment people are having a thin time of it. Hence, automatically, the -need to tell them that things are much worse even than they seem in countries like England ; and hencey a raspberry for the Academician. The Moscow censors must be working overtime on the thankless (and I should have thought rather pointless) task of postponing the date on which the outside,0 world will know that a vast and violent economic experiment is going through an awkward phase. The important thing was for the Russian Government to keep its deyaluation plans secret inside the U.S.S.R ; a partial failure to do this has probably helped to empty
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