Word: molotovs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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That night, Bevin and his colleagues (in the front rooms) did not get away for dinner. Throughout the last weary hours of the Paris Foreign Ministers' Conference, Bevin and Byrnes had tried to erect the framework of an Austrian peace treaty. Molotov stymied them with a typical Soviet roadblock: he would not discuss the matter before 437,000 supposedly fascist aliens in western Austria had been expelled...
Finally, at 9:15, Ernie Bevin's small brown eyes wearily encompassed the gilded room, of which everyone was heartily sick by now. As last-day chairman of the conference, he asked: "Any more items?" Bidault waved his hands in a negative gesture. Molotov gazed stonily through the window at the dusk settling over the Luxembourg Gardens. Byrnes shook his head and absently kept penciling a pattern of diminishing circles on a loose sheet of paper. "All right," said Bevin at 9:17. "We meet again at the Peace Conference...
...time has come," Molotov had said in Paris, "when we should discuss the fate of Germany." He held not one but two fates in store for the Reich. Most of his plan presented Russia as the great and only champion of German independence. As though the Russians had never raised the cry of vengeance, Molotov preached an unvengeful peace, called for economic reconstruction, demanded a centralized democratic government rather than a federalized one (a unified Germany would be much more easily Communized). His most sensational point: the Ruhr must not be separated from Germany...
...Monday, at the end of a five-hour session, Molotov finally agreed to a formula previously presented by Conciliator Bidault: the Ministers would recommend procedures (including a steering committee operating by two-thirds vote); but the Peace Conference would have the right to change the rules...
...arguments for keeping Trieste out of Yugoslav hands were good ones, and Secretary Byrnes and Foreign Secretary Bevin had made them. For the sake of getting on with the peace, they had compromised with Molotov on a French proposal to internationalize the city (which has a preponderantly Italian population, but is economically an outlet for Central Europe and the Balkans). Italian nationalist extremists, who cheered the 1940 attack on France with the land-greedy slogan "Corsica, Nice, Savoy," would scarcely improve their claims to Trieste by demonstrations against the West...