A Song of Fish & Potatoes

Says a Russian proverb: "A fish could sing a song if it had a voice." Last week, Russian fish (along with U.S. potatoes) told a story of Russia, Germany and peace that explained what was really happening at the Moscow Conference.

Up from Astrakhan. Pravda issued a pronunciamento: "In 1947, the prewar level of fish output must be exceeded," and published a touching letter to Stalin from the fishery collective workers of caviar-famed Astrakhan, promising to catch hundreds of thousands more ponds of fish than provided by the Five-Year Plan. This was part of a full-blast Soviet campaign to make workers and farmers meet their 1947 quotas ahead of time, "to honor the 30th anniversary of the Great October [Revolution]." For Russia was desperately short of consumer goods and dangerously short of food. Making the best of a bad spot, the Soviet Government played on the people's acute wants to discredit the rich U.S. Recently, the Soviet press reported that the U.S. was dumping potatoes to keep prices up, and the magazine Krokodil shed some tears (see cut).

Russian shortages explained Molotov's relentless insistence, at the Foreign Ministers' Conference, on huge reparations from German current production. But the reparations demands ran counter to the main Soviet goal for 1947--to capture German allegiance. At the conference table Molotov catered to German nationalism by prating of German "unity." But what two Russian generals recently said about German unity in Berlin was far more interesting than Molotov's Moscow rhetoric. During a private meeting with German Communists, Lieut. Generals Makarov and Georgiefi declared:

"It is necessary to emphasize again and again German unity ... a popular theme on which to work. ... All activities of the U.S. and Great Britain in western Germany opposed to our interests must be attacked continuously as undemocratic interference. . . ."

Man Without a Heart. In Moscow, Molotov followed essentially the same line when the question of the Saar came up last week. The U.S. and Britain favored its economic annexation by France. Molotov, mindful of his French party comrades, did not directly reject the suggestion, but, even more mindful of his German comrades, he sidestepped, and soon the diplomats were discussing the huge Russian reparations demands. That was where everyone had come in. Cried Andrei Vishinsky at a press conference: "A treaty without adequate reparations is like a man without a heart."

The second important German boundary issue concerned the territory tentatively handed over to Poland at Potsdam. Marshall recalled that a Potsdam clause said ("in plain English") that the final border settlement was reserved for a peace conference. Molotov quoted President Truman's report on Potsdam to support the Russian view that the boundary had been settled. Marshall immediately motioned for a copy of Truman's speech. This threw his advisers into a dither--they did not have the speech among their papers. Ben Cohen, who had drafted the address for Truman, saved the day: he frantically scribbled the disputed passages from memory. Marshall glanced at them and announced sternly: "President Truman was quoted out of context." (Truman had stated that Poland was to administer the German territories only until a final peace settlement, but he had also given the impression that the issue was pretty much settled.)

In Poland, Marshall's proposal for frontier revision provoked a blast of indignation against the West. Even anti-Communist Leader Stanislaw Mikolajczyk declared: "The frontiers of Poland must be considered settled and no longer open to question."

However, the Polish issue was secondary to the U.S.-Russian rivalry over Germany. To allay that rivalry, George Marshall this week reiterated the U.S. proposal for a four-power, 40-year alliance enforcing German disarmament.

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