STRONG BRITISH REPLY TO SOVIET CRITICISM OF MARSHALL AID

Grey River Argus, 26 February 1949, Page 5

STRONG BRITISH REPLY TO SOVIET CRITICISM OF MARSHALL AID

Secrecy About Russian Conditions

(Rec. 9.0) NEV/ YORK, Feb. 24 Mr Christopher Mayhew, the British Under-Secretary, of State, to-day vigorously denied a Soviet accusation that the'Marshall plan was hampering European* economy. Mr Mayhew speaking in the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council said "Marshall Aid has been and continues to be, vital to the economic recovery of Western Europe. My country could not do without it.” Earlier, the Soviet delegate, M. Semyon Tsarapkin, attacked the Marshall Plan, which he said was not only hampering the recovery of Western Europe, but was also attempting to boycott Eastern Europe. He claimed that the conditions of workers in the capitalist countries were getting worse, whereas, in the Soviet, they were constantly improving.

Mr Mayhew, in re-ffy, asked why, it tne Soviet was so eager to show it was a workers’ paradise, it did not publish any figures to support its claim? Why were there no statistics from Russia about the living standards there he asked?

The reason for this secrecy was clear. “It is because the Soviet wants to keep alive the Communist propaganda myth that the Soviet is ahead in democratic and progressive advances, a myth that the country with the lowest working standards in Europe actually has the highest, a myth that the Soviet, the most totalitarian country in Europe, is really the most democratic.” Mr Mayhew said that the reality of Western European recovery and the success of the Marshall Plan were making Soviet hypotheses more and more wildly extravagant. , „ . „ Dealing with the repeated Soviet accusation about American “economic imperialism” Mr Mayhew asked the Council to consider the fate of Yugoslavia, which because it did not submit to certain political conditions, had seen its trade with the Soviet cut to one-eighth as a reprisal. . “This is Soviet economic imperialism, and no country in Western Europe would tolerate one small part of the economic domination suffered oy Yugoslavia at the hands of the Soviet,” he said.