Stalin States His Price For Peace?

Northern Advocate, 5 August 1949, Page 5

Stalin States His Price For Peace?

NEW'YORK, Thu. (10.30 a.m.). —M. Stalin was reported today to have laid down five conditions as his price for world peace. The United Nations World, an unofficial publication on world affairs, said the conditions were written down by a top-ranking American businessman after a New York conversation with the Soviet diplomat, M. Andrei Gromyko. j The conditions were:

(1) A treaty between the United Stales and the Soviet Union formalising the commitments of both countries as set forth in the Yalta and Potsdam documents; (2) Four-power unanimity on all questions concerning Germany; (3) Western generosity on reparations for Russia; <■" (4) Immediate cessation of AngloAmerican support of “subversive Fascist Hitlerite elements”; (5) Elimination of all discriminatory trade practices. On the first point the businessman noted that “as a supreme realist, Stalin wants this to be a strictly bilateral pact, excluding the United Kingdom and the countries of Western Europe, which he dismisses as negligible quantities.” LOAN WANTED. On the second point it was added: “M. Stalin will never give ground on this issue, because he believes the restoration of Germany, promoted by either East or West acting alone, is certain to lead to war.” It was also stated that M, Stalin regarded the issue of reparations in kind as “a token of Western recognition of the Soviet’s enormous bloodletting in the Second World War.” M. Stalin, further, was said to link the elimination of all discriminatory trade practices with the resumption of normal trade relations, stimulaed by a $2,000,000,000 loan by the United States to Russia on terms similar to those of the 1946 loan to Britain.