International: Strains & Scuffles

Sometimes the U.S. and its European partners get so busy with their own noisy spats, shufflings and disappointments that they fail to hear the scuffling on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But last week, in the aftermath of Czechoslovakia’s Slansky trial, the scuffling could be plainly heard, and louder than usual.

Four years ago the Communists resolved to turn their seven East European satellites from what was once Europe’s granary into Russia’s arsenal. This was the Molotov Plan, to counter the Marshall Plan, and it got a bureaucratic name: KOMEKON.† The goal was gargantuan: to create a new industrial empire, 90 million strong. The cost, in hardship, did not matter.

In KOMEKON, Eastern Europe today has economic union, while Western Europe still debates it. The U.N. last month reported with surprise that Eastern Europe’s trade, “including the U.S.S.R., appeared to have increased tenfold since 1938,” while Western Europe’s was up only 38.9%.

KOMEKON’s progress is disturbingly impressive, but the strain, the sacrifice, the sabotage and the suffering is also immense —and sizable enough for the Communists themselves to acknowledge. From their own propaganda broadcasts, from hour after monotonous hour of “selfcriticism” at the Czech purge trials, from intelligence studies of East Europe’s censored, servile press last week, came these portents of KOMEKON’s troubles:

East Germany, said its boss, Communist Party Secretary Walter Ulbricht, suffers because it has “failed to assimilate progressive Soviet science and technology.” There are shortages of steel, coal, power, labor and transport, he told the Communist Party Central Committee, because “some people are still strongly influenced by religion, and believe that Socialism will come from Heaven. This is erroneous.” From the sovietized Bergmann-Borsig engineering works in East Berlin, Communist inspectors reported: “Working according to schedule is an extremely rare event . . . An average of ten substandard cylinder heads has been made for every one that was up to standard.” At the huge Iron Works East at Furstenberg on the Oder, reporters from Neues Deutschland, official organ of the German Communist Party, found Foreman Horst Kewitsch angrily complaining: “Serious … is the lack of replacement parts. To keep working, we have had to replace parts in Furnace Two with parts from Furnace Three; now, we have to replace the missing parts from Furnace Three with parts from Furnace Four.” Carpenter Giinter Blankenburg groused that the solitary electric bulb in his barracks gives “less light than a candle flame.” But the chief complaint was lack of food: “Sometimes,” said Walter Jerkisch, “you can’t buy butter or margarine at all . . .”

East German Premier Otto Grotewohl himself admitted that “capitalist elements have succeeded in disrupting the population’s food supply.” His government last week closed its state-owned groceries in East Berlin to prevent “enemy agents” (i.e., West Berlin housewives) from buying up the rations of the hungry Communists. Neues Deutschland ominously pinned the blame on “the kulaks” (i.e., richer peasant farmers). “They are intensifying their fight against the might of democracy,” the Communist paper wrote, “assaulting organizers of collective farms, sabotaging their delivery quotas and not paying taxes.”

Czechoslovakia. To a conference of Consumer Cooperatives in Prague, Communist Party Secretary Josef Tesla announced “great deficiencies” in coal production. Food Minister Ludmila Jankoucova broadcast an appeal for wheelbarrows and carts to ease a “transport crisis” on the Czech railroads. Both seemed anxious to lay the blame on Slansky & Co., who were even then headed for the gallows. As if in explanation, Radio Prague played recordings from the trial testimony of Ludvik Frejka, who was author of the Czechoslovakian two-and five-year plans.

Judge: What were your crimes in the sphere of fuel and power?

Frejka: We created such a disproportion between supply and demand that the supply of fuel and power suffered—as is well known—continued interruption. The liquidation of this sabotage of ours will take a long time . . .

Judge: [Specify] some of your sabotage of heavy industry.

Frejka: I diverted funds from heavy industries to various superfluous projects, such as textile mills … In the sphere of foreign trade, the group committed extensive wrecking and sabotage . . .

Poland. “We have so many coal mines, yet coal is rationed,” wrote a Polish housewife last month to Radio Warsaw. “Where is it all going?” Warsaw’s answer: “For the great constructions of Socialism”—i.e., Red army steel and munitions plants. The Poles had other troubles. Cracow’s Communist Echo grumbled that “not even State [haberdashers] can conceal sleeves of different lengths, bursting seams, ill-fitting collars, missing buttons.” Polish children go hungry. The potato supply, wrote Warsaw’s Trybuna Ludu last month, is only 40% of the quota; since then, spuds have become even scarcer.

Hungary. Deputy Premier Erno Gero told his Communist Central Committee last week that the country is doing just fine—except in coal, steel, power, transport, building, lumber and farming. There has been “a tremendous upsurge of our industry,” but “here & there” are inconsistencies. Among them:

¶ Agricultural production is “considerably short of the estimated plan . . . for 1952.”

¶ “The coal mines in October fell 112,000 tons short of their target.” Chief reason, said Gero, an “anti-machine attitude” on the part of the workers, if “The extent of substandard work in [some] steel-rolling mills is outright intolerable.”

Bulgaria. Radio Sofia found industry suffering from a “barbaric attitude towards machines.” Wrote the Communist Rabotnichesko Delo: “In the Balchik tractor station, combines were left in such condition that wheat began to grow in them.” The Minister of Agriculture abjectly confesses that the 1952 tobacco and wheat crop has been cut down by drought to 79% of last year’s harvest. The Ministry of Electrification limited every household in Sofia to one light bulb.

Rumania. A cold and hungry winter is in prospect. To “remedy … the shortage of fuel,” the Communist Council of Ministers ordered the peasants to “make full use, as fuel, of agricultural waste, sedge, and other materials.”

KOMEKON’s statistical charts report that East Europe’s coal and steel production is booming. But it has no room, and feels no need to footnote the human strains and suffering.

† Short for Komitet Ekonomicheskoy Vzaimopomoshchi, or Council for Economic Mutual Assistance.