The Grey River Argus WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1948. HARDER GOING FOR COMINFORM?

Grey River Argus, 8 September 1948, Page 4

The Grey River Argus WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1948. HARDER GOING FOR COMINFORM?

PROM the fact that in the Berlin area the initiative continues to remain with the Communists, it appears as if the Western Powers are conscious that the Soviet has the whip hand. Following the raids at the City Hall, the City Assembly has had to decamp from the Russian sector. The air-lift may meantime supply enough to avert starvation, but in the Western sectors of Berlin the population must be in a very unenviable position. The latest suggestion of a solution is no more than that of Mr J. F. Byrnes, the former U.S. Secretary of, State, who knows the inside of things, and reckons that peace is obtainable so long as Germany is demilitarised for two generations. This would suit the French. Russian assertions that the British and Americans would countenance German rearmament would then lose any force they might meantime possess. The idea of a West German Federation does not mean rearmament, any more than Mi* Byrnes’ idea that,- with a demilitarisation agreement, the occupying Powers could pull out nearly all of their forces. Russia might reply that when that was done after the first -war, the Germans in fact did rearm. Mr Byrnes might reckon that the main obstacle to a settlement is the presence in Germany of much greater Russian forces than those of all the others combined. The vital question, however, is whether the Soviet has any notion of relaxing its hold upon Eastern Germany. The Polish regime is now accusing Britain of a design to restore to Germany that much of its former territory as the Soviet has tacked on. to Poland. There are more reasons than one why Moscow does not want to let go any area where its edict now runs. The danger is that a small dribble of that sort might swell into a torrent of disruption.

Those -who envisage Europe’s future as permanently bound up with the present great measure of Communistic power and sway are probably persuaded that the Soviet is firmer in its saddle than any other European regime. On the contrary, the stand at Berlin may be designed to preclude, the risk of a reverse and a setback. Such a thing is far more likely to come from within than from without. This is the conviction of Russians abroad who know their country as others do not. They do not stake any beans on a counter revolution. They' rather say that new forces to which the 1918 revolution gave birth will finally change the situation from a revolutionary to a normal situation. At anyrate, the Soviet is certainly showing no signs at Berlin at least that it fears Western Powers can put a stop either to its reign or its expansion. There is, despite all the propaganda of an American imperialistic Avar design, no credible evidence of Western opposition. Mr Byrnes’ idea is quite the opposite, and there is an entire absence from British and French policy of measures to do any more than negotiate with the Soviet. The latest disclosure that France would be enabled to use Marshall Aid for the purchase of military equipment in Britain is easily explained. The French have no finance to arm, and the fact explains the recent rapid Cabinet changes, due to an insistence that any available finance snail go to feed hungry workers and restore industry. The most significant developments of late have really been the' Cominform’s action in pointing the bone at Tito, and now at the Polish Vice-Premier, Gomulka. The Communist Parties of Yugoslavia and Poland nave not kept to the line of Marxian-Leninism. Tito’s fundamental offence is that he declares the peasantry to be “the most stable foundation of our State”. The Communist dictators wish him gradually to

liquidate the whole peasantry in the same way as they have been liquidated in Russia. The so-call-ed union of workers and peasants is in Communistic strategy the prelude to placing the peasantry on a proletarian basis, without any property, but subject to the dictatorship of wages workers. But Yugoslavia is itself as essentially a country of peasants as is Bulgaria, where Dmitrov is still with Moscoav in opposing Tito. The truth about the case of the Polish Workers’ Party, whose million members, with their leader, are said to have gone off the Communistic rails, is not yet out. Gomulka, the leader, has toed the line to the • extent of accusing himself of having been Polish rather than Communist, but the odds are that he and his party’s “deviations” have been not sufficiently subservient to the Kremlin, as well as. heretical in the sense that they are less merciless than Moscow in liquidating any class which does not fit into that defined by Lenin or Marx as proletarians, or without productive property of any sort. Yugoslav peasants are classified by Communists into three types—“Kulaks”, medium and poor. Tito is expected to liquidate the first named, as possessing more land than the others —but the ultimate goal is no peasantry at all. It is now reported, that the Polish purge is expected to extend to Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The question is really whether the Kremlin can sell its own imperialism .to the rest of Slavdom, as well as adjacent countries, in the name of Communism. The. stand at Berlin by the Western Powers may not be much of a stand, but it yet may cut ice in quarters some distance from Berlin.