Sometimes the U.S. and its European partners get so busy with their own noisy spats, shufflings and disappointments that they fail to hear the scuffling on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But last week, in the aftermath of Czechoslovakia's Slansky trial, the scuffling could be plainly heard, and louder than usual.
Four years ago the Communists resolved to turn their seven East European satellites from what was once Europe's granary into Russia's arsenal. This was the Molotov Plan, to counter the Marshall Plan, and it got a bureaucratic name: KOMEKON.† The goal was gargantuan: to create a new industrial empire, 90 million strong. The cost, in hardship, did not matter.
In KOMEKON, Eastern Europe today has economic union, while Western Europe still debates it. The U.N. last month reported with surprise that Eastern Europe's trade, "including the U.S.S.R., appeared to have increased tenfold since 1938," while Western Europe's was up only 38.9%.
KOMEKON's progress is disturbingly impressive, but the strain, the sacrifice, the sabotage and the suffering is also immense —and sizable enough for the Communists themselves to acknowledge. From their own propaganda broadcasts, from hour after monotonous hour of "selfcriticism" at the Czech purge trials, from intelligence studies of East Europe's censored, servile press last week, came these portents of KOMEKON's troubles:
East Germany, said its boss, Communist Party Secretary Walter Ulbricht, suffers because it has "failed to assimilate progressive Soviet science and technology." There are shortages of steel, coal, power, labor and transport, he told the Communist Party Central Committee, because "some people are still strongly influenced by religion, and believe that Socialism will come from Heaven. This is erroneous." From the sovietized Bergmann-Borsig engineering works in East Berlin, Communist inspectors reported: "Working according to schedule is an extremely rare event . . . An average of ten substandard cylinder heads has been made for every one that was up to standard." At the huge Iron Works East at Furstenberg on the Oder, reporters from Neues Deutschland, official organ of the German Communist Party, found Foreman Horst Kewitsch angrily complaining: "Serious ... is the lack of replacement parts. To keep working, we have had to replace parts in Furnace Two with parts from Furnace Three; now, we have to replace the missing parts from Furnace Three with parts from Furnace Four." Carpenter Giinter Blankenburg groused that the solitary electric bulb in his barracks gives "less light than a candle flame." But the chief complaint was lack of food: "Sometimes," said Walter Jerkisch, "you can't buy butter or margarine at all . . ."