SOVIET AND BRITISH COMMENT

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25427, 25 February 1948, Page 7

SOVIET AND BRITISH COMMENT

The Moscow radio said yesterday that western European newspapers in “publishing provocative stories that the Communists had engineered the Czech crisis are attempting to justify the reactionary Czech politicans’ endeavours to sabotage the nationalisation programme at the expense of splitting the Government. “There is no crisis except in the reactionary camp,” it added. “Czech reactionary elements chose the present pre-election moment for provocation because the National Front is gaining strength and becoming a really broad union of all the country’s democratic forces, not merely a coalition of parties and leaders.”

Allegations which have been made in Prague that a Czech, General Lew Prchala, and the exiled Polish gen-

eral, General Anders, have ‘‘engineered a Czech anti-State plot in the interests of a certain foreign Power,” will be investigated. A British Foreign Office spokesman made this announcement at a press conference yesterday. Asked whether Britain had the right to concern itself with happenings in Czechoslovakia, the spokesman said that it was natural for any democratic country to concern itself with the fate of another democracy. The spokesman added that the presence in Prague at present of a Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister (Mr Zorin) had been noted with interest, since another Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister (Mr Vyshinsky) had visited Bucharest in March, 1945, when Dr. Groza’s Communist-controlled Government came to power in Rumania.