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East German Premier Otto Grotewohl himself admitted that "capitalist elements have succeeded in disrupting the population's food supply." His government last week closed its state-owned groceries in East Berlin to prevent "enemy agents" (i.e., West Berlin housewives) from buying up the rations of the hungry Communists. Neues Deutschland ominously pinned the blame on "the kulaks" (i.e., richer peasant farmers). "They are intensifying their fight against the might of democracy," the Communist paper wrote, "assaulting organizers of collective farms, sabotaging their delivery quotas and not paying taxes."
Czechoslovakia. To a conference of Consumer Cooperatives in Prague, Communist Party Secretary Josef Tesla announced "great deficiencies" in coal production. Food Minister Ludmila Jankoucova broadcast an appeal for wheelbarrows and carts to ease a "transport crisis" on the Czech railroads. Both seemed anxious to lay the blame on Slansky & Co., who were even then headed for the gallows. As if in explanation, Radio Prague played recordings from the trial testimony of Ludvik Frejka, who was author of the Czechoslovakian two-and five-year plans.
Judge: What were your crimes in the sphere of fuel and power?
Frejka: We created such a disproportion between supply and demand that the supply of fuel and power suffered—as is well known—continued interruption. The liquidation of this sabotage of ours will take a long time . . .
Judge: [Specify] some of your sabotage of heavy industry.
Frejka: I diverted funds from heavy industries to various superfluous projects, such as textile mills ... In the sphere of foreign trade, the group committed extensive wrecking and sabotage . . .
Poland. "We have so many coal mines, yet coal is rationed," wrote a Polish housewife last month to Radio Warsaw. "Where is it all going?" Warsaw's answer: "For the great constructions of Socialism"—i.e., Red army steel and munitions plants. The Poles had other troubles. Cracow's Communist Echo grumbled that "not even State [haberdashers] can conceal sleeves of different lengths, bursting seams, ill-fitting collars, missing buttons." Polish children go hungry. The potato supply, wrote Warsaw's Trybuna Ludu last month, is only 40% of the quota; since then, spuds have become even scarcer.
Hungary. Deputy Premier Erno Gero told his Communist Central Committee last week that the country is doing just fine—except in coal, steel, power, transport, building, lumber and farming. There has been "a tremendous upsurge of our industry," but "here & there" are inconsistencies. Among them:
¶ Agricultural production is "considerably short of the estimated plan . . . for 1952."
¶ "The coal mines in October fell 112,000 tons short of their target." Chief reason, said Gero, an "anti-machine attitude" on the part of the workers, if "The extent of substandard work in [some] steel-rolling mills is outright intolerable."