RUSSIA ACCUSED

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26216, 29 July 1946, Page 5

RUSSIA ACCUSED

STRIPPING OF HUNGARY UNITED STATES DEMANDS (Rec. 7 p.m.) WASHINGTON, July 27. The State Department has published a strongly-worded letter from its Ambassador, Bedell Smith, to Mr Molotov, in which Mr Bedell Smith accused Russia of stripping Hungary of food supplies and vitally needed industrial materials. The letter, which was presented on direct instructions from Washington, flatly rejected the whole series of Soviet claims that Russia was not interfering with economic conditions in Hungary, and virtually demanded that Moscow should join Great Britain and America to halt the economic disintegration of Hungary. Mr Bedell Smith disputed Moscow's recent charges that Hungary’s plight had been caused by the failure of the United States to restore to Hungary supplies and machinery which the Nazis looted and which were now held in the American occupation zones in Germany and Austria. The letter added that Russia was at present taking 50 per cent, of Hungary's manufactures, including 80 to 90 per cent, of the output of heavy industries. The United States has been reliably informed that in 1945 the Red Army took 4,000.000 tons of wheat and other cereals from Hungary. That figure was more than half the country’s pre-war production. During the last six months of 1945 the Red Army took nearly all the meat from urban food stocks.

Stating that Washington might reopen the question of Hungary’s reparations to the Soviet, Mr Bedell Smith said that when the United States agreed to them, it did not foresee 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 24 per cent, of the country’s national income, or that Hungary would be .required to surrender large quantities of goods and services beyond the reparations obligation.