Crossroads

Abstract

On August 13, 1947, as an election campaign fraught with dubious practices was in full swing, Hungary concluded with Great Britain a commercial treaty calling for Hungarian food shipments in exchange for capital machinery. The treaty came on the heels of failed talks of a similar nature between Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Moscow experienced the first unhappy consequences of its veto on satellite participation in the Marshall Plan. By forbidding the border states to receive American grants, the soviets accepted implicit responsibility for providing them with goods the United States would otherwise have provided. The result was a reverse pattern in established soviet commercial practice: the USSR was obliged to export whereas till now the flow of goods had been in its direction only. When the talks with England got under way it became clear that the British expected heavy grain shipments from Russia (at a time when the soviet people were near starvation). Moscow, unwilling to admit that its available grain would henceforth go to East Europe, demanded impossibly high prices for it and the British terminated the talks.¹