SOVIET THREAT.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20274, 7 April 1934, Page 19

SOVIET THREAT.

Cheaper and Longer Credit Demanded. MOSCOW, February 11. The Soviet Government will refuse to buy more equipment from abroad unless it is granted long-term loans at a low rate of interest. This threat to foreign manufactures was delivered by M. Rosenholz, Commissar for Foreign Trade, when he addressed the Seventeenth Communist Party Congress here to-day. He attacked the British Government for “ deliberately attempting to force the Soviet Union into bankruptcy,” and described the Birmingham Institute of Russian Studies as a “ gang of

bloody White Guards,” who were trying to prove that the Soviet was going bankrupt. The second five-year plan (from 1933 to 1937 inclusive), M. Rosenholz declared, could be carried out with an “ insignificant ” import of foreign industrial equipment—less than 300,000,000 gold roubles’ worth. This is less than double the value of such imports for last year alone.

“ We shall not,” he continued, ‘‘make any considerable purchases abroad unless the conditions of sale are radically altered for better. If we are offered long-term loans at a normally low rate ot interest, we shall consider such offers, and then, possibly, agree to supplementary imports. But we shall not agree to any rise in prices or to high rates of interest for credit, which are often introduced in a camouflaged way by raising the sale price.” The British Government, he declared,

had imposed the recent embargo not in retaliation for the sentences of imprisonment imposed on Mr MacDonald and Mr Thornton at the Moscow trial, but in order to force the Soviet into bankruptc}'. The attempt had failed, he added. “ When the embargo was removed, we actually received higher prices for our timber than before—as if to compensate us for delayed shipments. We ' lost nothing by this embargo,” he went on—“ I do not know about the British.” Seventy per cent of the exports of old Russia were of agricultural produce. The Bolsheviks had changed all that, and to-day 70 per cent of Soviet exports were industrial. (In this ha presumably included timber.) “ We have greatly reduced our grain exports, and have nearly ceased export, ing sugar,” he said. “In 1933 we stopped exporting geese, tinned food and herrings.”