International: Boardinghouse Reach

The Red Army’s sweep through Manchuria swept up, among other industrial loot, a Japanese optical-goods factory at Mukden. On the guard-box at the factory entrance (see cut) Russian soldiers painted Prince Alexander Nevsky’s triumphant boast after his Russians had crushed the invading Teutonic Knights at Lake Peipus in 1242:

Who comes to us with the sword

Will perish by the sword;

On these words the Russian land

Ever stood, will ever stand.

To the lands she had conquered Russia had brought not only the sword but the salvage crew and empty freight train. These instruments of conquest, like the sword, could summon up bitter resistance. Russia’s eagerness to grab industrial equipment might get in the way of her more important program of political expansion. And Russia, wolfing her conquests in eastern Europe and Manchuria, hungered for still more that was outside the boardinghouse reach of the Red Army.

The U.S. saw some hope of trading on Russia’s eagerness for reparations from western Germany to win Russian consent for economic unity in Germany.

Last week the U.S. added new counts to its indictment of the Russian grab. Washington protested Russia’s stripping of Hungary (see FOREIGN NEWS), and Edwin W. Pauley, chief U.S. reparations surveyor, charged that Russia’s looting of Manchuria had stopped the wheels of $2 billion worth of industries and set back by a generation the industrial advancement of 900 million Asiatics.

Pauley neatly tied reparations to the issue of integrated administration of Germany. German reparations cannot be shipped to Russia, he said, “because no zone commander can go forward until he knows whether Germany is in reality to be treated as a single economic unit, as was agreed at Potsdam, or whether he must plan to run his zone as an independent economy.”

Meanwhile Russian engineers hastily but with loving care dismantled a power plant in Bavaria, in the U.S. zone, which had been earmarked for Russia before reparations were suspended. Said the wrinkle-browed, grim-faced Soviet colonel who supervised the work: “You [Americans] don’t understand what reparations mean. . . . To us it is an absolutely vital part of our national economy—something we must have if the Soviet people are going to get a standard of living anywhere near what they had in the middle thirties, which, God knows, was low enough. . . . Politically it makes our row harder to hoe, but economic necessities of our own country take precedence over foreign advertising.”