RUSSIA ACCUSED

Greymouth Evening Star, 29 July 1946, Page 5

RUSSIA ACCUSED

HUNGARIAN INDUSTRY STRIPPED STRONG AMERICAN PROTEST WASHINGTON, July 27. The United States State Department has published a strongly-word-ed letter from the United States Ambassador to Moscow (LieutenantGeneral Bedell Smith) to Mr. Molotov, in which the Ambassador accuses Russia of stripping Hungary of food’supplies and vitally needed industrial materials. The letter, which was presented on direct instructions from Washington, flatly rejected a whole series of Soviet claims that Russia is not interfering with economic conditions in Hungary and virtually demanded that Moscow join Britain and America to halt the economic disintegration of Hungary. Lieutenant-General Bedell Smith disputed Moscow’s recent charges that Hungary’s plight was caused by the United States’ failure to restore to Hungary, supplies of machinery which the Nazis looted and which were now held in the American occupation zones of Germany and Austria. ' The letter added that Russia was at present taking 50 per cent of Hungary’s manufactures, including oO to 90 per cent, of her heavy industries output. The United States was reliably informed that the Red Army in 1945 took 4,000,000 tons of wheat and other cereals from Hungary, which was more than half the country’s pre-war production, and that the Red Army during the last six months of 1945 took out from urban food stocks nearly all the meat reserves. , „ „ ... Lieutenant-General Bedell . Smith, saying that Washington might reopen the question of Hungary s reparations to the Soviet, said that when the United States agreed to them it did not forsee that Hungary s production capacity and national income would be reduced by 50 per cent, within a few months, that reparations payable in 1945 would equal 2 per cent, of the country s national income, or that Hungary would be required to surrender large quantities of goods and services beyond her reparations obligations. ~