SOVIET WRITER’S ATTACK

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25306, 4 October 1947, Page 9

SOVIET WRITER’S ATTACK

GENERAL MARSHALL CRITICISED ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN MOSCOW WASHINGTON, October 2. According to the United Press, the State Department has received from the United States Ambassador to Moscow (Lieutenant-General Walter Bedell Smith) extracts from an article, written by N. Pogodin and published in the Moscow “Literary Gazette,” bitterly attacking the Secretary of State (General George C. Marshall). Referring to the Marshall plan, Pogodin described its author as “a dreadful old man, a Shakespearean Shylock, revengeful, unmerciiul, and insatiable in his greed.”

The writer added: “From the moment of his speech (at Princeton on June 5) dollars, and only dollars, have served as a gigantic .bait, an irresistible magnet for officers, inflamed politicians, parliamentarians, men of affairs, and publicists in the western section of Europe.” The article was written a week after Boris Gorbatov’s attack on President Truman, which Lieutenant-Gen-eral Bedell Smith protested was “wantonly libellous.”

Lieutenant-General Bedell Smith’s letter reporting the attack on Mr Truman described Gorbatov’s article, in which the President was likened to Hitler, as “shocking,” adding that every fair-minded American citizen, regardless of his political opinions, would be deeply affronted and would feel that he in some way shared the personal insult gratuitously offered Mr Truman.

In this case the Soviet rejected the United States protest. Lieutenant-General Bedell Smith’s only action in the attack on General Marshall was to send the highlights of the article to the State Department without comment.