Word: west
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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...
...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 Germany...
...Maximum. The different planes from which West and East looked down on Germany became more evident as the week wore on. The courtesy wilted steadily. By Thursday night the talks had reached the level of restrained acerbity. The three Western powers were asking Russia to quit stalling and tell precisely what it wanted out of the conference that it had requested as a condition for lifting the Berlin blockade. Vishinsky was snapping back that no one could "impose" on him any topics of discussion...
...West was not sanguine that Russia would accept this position. It expected no dramatic general settlement. But it felt reasonably sure that the Russians wanted a limited agreement. If so, at what point...