811.50/5–2047: Telegram
The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Durbrow) to the Secretary of State
1832. My next following telegram (1841 May 201) contains summary of long article by authoritative Soviet economist Varga2 denouncing [Page 562] American economic policy, free trade, and our efforts at Geneva World Trade Conference.3 Attention particularly directed to last paragraph regarding non-participation Soviet Geneva Conference, which “indicates only that questions discussed at Geneva have no direct interest to Soviet Union, in view existence state monopoly foreign trade, fundamental element Soviet economic system”.4
This presentation is of particular interest, as it constitutes what would no doubt be Soviet position, should they eventually accept invitation to participate in ITO and leads to inescapable conclusion that purpose of such participation would be primarily to obstruct the very objectives we are seeking to attain.
Pouched to London and Paris. (Department please repeat Geneva as Moscow’s 2.)
- Not printed. The telegram number has been changed on the Department’s file copy from 1833 to 1841. Telegram 1841 contained an extensive summary of the article entitled “Geneva Conference on Question [of] World Trade” in the periodical New Times for May 16, 1947.↩
- Yevgeny (Eugene) Samoylovich Varga was the Hungarian-born famous Soviet economist, Academician, and Director of the Institute of World Economics and World Politics in the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union until October 1947.↩
- Early in the article the general criticism of American economic policy was summarized in telegram 1841 in these words: “American policy determined by fact that productive capacity US has come to significantly exceed capacity of internal market. Result is chronic mass unemployment. At present boom continues, but crisis ripens. When crisis comes, there will be mass unemployment. Economic policy US is directed at forcing other countries to adopt principle of ‘most favored nation’ trading and by this means to secure increased demand for merchandise on world market and thus to solve or to render less acute the problem goods surpluses.”↩
- This paragraph is in fact the next to the last in telegram 1841.↩