EAST GERMANY: Most Useful Satellite

Alongside bustling, burgeoning West Germany (pop. 52 million), the Soviet-rigged German Democratic Republic, with its grey, ruin-strewn cities and 17½ million sullen, shabby subjects, looks a sorry state. It is a poor thing, but Khrushchev’s own. He is determined to hang on to it.

To the Russians, East Germany constitutes the most highly developed industrial base and concentration of working skills under Communist control. Quite apart from its key strategic importance as the position from which 22 Red army divisions maintain Soviet military dominance over the whole East European satellite world, this hapless, cheerless rump of a country has such invaluable economic uses to the Soviet Union that Nikita Khrushchev is binding it to Russia by ties meant to last for years.

Pour Out. Already integrated Soviet-bloc plans have driven East Germany ahead of Red China and Czechoslovakia as Russia’s No. 1 trading partner, turning Soviet raw materials into every kind of machine from dynamos for Soviet dams to electronic components for Sputniks. The Russians are pouring millions of marks into making Rostock a major seaport, a substitute for East Germany’s natural outlet of Hamburg. Under the grandiose new Khrushchev expansion plans, the Russians have agreed to give East Germany the equivalent of nearly $200 million in economic aid next year, and have assigned the East Germans an industrial specialty: chemicals. The East Germans are under orders to exploit their only significant natural resource—lignite, or brown coal—as the wartime Nazis did, to make coke, gases, diesel oil and synthetic products in vastly increased quantities. Russia has promised to build a pipeline from Baku to East Germany to pump 5,000,000 tons of oil, with which a petrochemical industry based on the giant former I. G. Farben plants at Leuna, Halle and Bitterfeld can double East Germany’s output of plastics and synthetic fibers.

The Kremlin’s new plans, which also include closing down unprofitable coal mines at Zwickau, cutting output of machine tools that Russia now produces, curtailing expansion of the ill-placed Stalinstadt steel works, building a merchant marine for Red China, and collectivizing more potato lands, spell harsh new shutdowns and uprootings for the East Germans. Nonetheless, it is a complete reversal of Russia’s postwar practice of ripping up railroads, carrying off generators and machine tools.

Trickle Down. A little bit of the new trade money has trickled down to East German workers. A West German magazine has compared East Germany’s latter-day progress to the West German level of 1949 (“Eat your fill and dress modestly”). This probably gives them now the highest living standard behind the Iron Curtain. The ineffable East German Communist Boss, Walter Ulbricht, a Soviet citizen, now proclaims the inevitable propaganda slogan: “Catch Up with West Germany in Per Capita Production by 1961.”

But Khrushchev’s economic plan for the East Germans means a new kind of dependence on their old Russian foes, and its fulfillment is a political question—on which East Germans, whatever their phony 99.9% elections say, still vote with their feet by fleeing West at the rate of 2,000 a week.