Word: russianizing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...strikers offered to man certain switch-boxes from the Western zones into Berlin's Western sectors, while still blocking Soviet trains bound for the Russian sector. The Russians indignantly refused. Their German stooges said they were ready to pay 60% of the workers' wages in West marks. The strikers said no. They demanded all their pay in West marks-the demand which had precipitated, the strike. When Russian violence failed, it looked as if the strike might go on for a while. U.S. and British planes stepped up their airlift loads to 8,000 tons a day. Berliners...
...West suspected that the point was economic. The Allied counter-blockade had hurt Russian-controlled East Germany and East Europe more than the Soviet blockade of Berlin had hurt the West. Therefore Moscow wanted to resume trade between Eastern and Western zones...
...economic point was the week's touchiest. Acheson bluntly said that, to the best of his knowledge, East Germany was a deficit economy in which the Russian state had taken possession of a third of all industrial enterprise. Vishinsky painted a different picture of East Germany. Its industrial output, he said, was 96.6% of 1936-more progress than the 90% claimed for West Germany. Britain's Ernest Bevin, cigarette drooping from a corner of his mouth, thanked Vishinsky for "this tableau of Oriental prosperity," promised to bring it to the attention of the "thousands of refugees" from Soviet...
...Next Step. Should the West, too want an economic arrangement? Allied views differed. Some ECAmericans, led by European ECA Chief Averell Harriman, believed East-West trade would bring more benefits to the West (in raw materials, less U.S. aid, loosening of the Russian hold on satellite nations, etc.) than to the East. Others held that a restoration of trade would not pay off unless it was accompanied by an eastward advance of Western ideology. In return for economic benefits Eastern Europe must grant democratic political reforms...
After four days' debate on his proposals, Vishinsky asked the Westerners for their ideas. Acheson, Bevin and Schuman hammered out a proposal. Highlights: unity under the Bonn constitution, no more reparations out of current production, no Russian ownership of German industry, four-power control through a High Commission bound by majority decision "save in exceptional circumstances...