Communists: Bungling Materialists

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In Warsaw last week, thousands of Polish housewives queued up for sugar, flour, salt and potatoes. A shiny new self-service market called "Super Sam"* rang up $4,000 in sales during its first two hours.

To stem the panic buying, the regime dispatched extra food allotments into the city, reassuringly announced that warehouse supplies were ample. Few shoppers were convinced, especially after city officials set limits to individual purchases.

The housewives' fear was obvious. Poland, they were sure, was about to follow the Soviet Union in raising food prices.

Said one woman: "Why else did Gomulka go to Moscow?" Two Problems. Polish Party Boss Gomulka was not the only satellite leader to make the trip. Summoned unexpectedly to the Kremlin last week were the bosses of the Soviet Union's other dependencies —East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary. Reason for the conclave: a top-level meeting of COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), the lame, 13-year-old Communist-bloc alliance originally designed by Stalin as an answer to the Marshall Plan. The COMECON agenda was, as usual, secret, but obviously two acute problems had converged to unsettle Soviet policymakers: 1) the booming success of the Common Market, which violates Red dogma that capitalist states must devour each other in competition for new markets; 2) the chronic failure of collectivized Communist agriculture.

Moscow obviously felt that COMECON ought to imitate Western Europe by closer economic integration. It has been tried before. There has been some success in sharing manufacturing tasks (e.g., Poland to specialize in coal-mining and transport equipment; Czechoslovakia in heavy electrical equipment). But most other COMECON integration attempts have failed because the satellites have learned to distrust each other's—and Moscow's—promises. As Gomulka once complained: "Everyone peels his own turnip." Six Competitors. The meatiest turnip is the Common Market. Satellite commerce with Western Europe (most of it with the Six) is the bloc's main source of hard currency, and in the case of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia accounts for 30% of their trade. The Reds fear that this trade will be sharply cut as the Six deal more among themselves and less with nonmembers across the tariff wall, and that Communist trade will be clobbered in non-European markets by competition from the Six. To visiting Italian Foreign Trade Minister Luigi Preti, Khrushchev complained last week that the partnership between capitalist countries "is a marriage against nature, and nature will see it broken. In this marriage, there are not two sexes, male and female, only two males.''

No one understood why Nikita regarded Bella Italia as male (or the other Common Market partners, for that matter). But natural or not, COMECON was eager to share in the marriage. The meeting's final communique again called for a new, worldwide trade organization to rival the Common Market, but at the same time hoped for increased trade with the West. The message also promised, as Moscow had innumerable times before, that "in the near future" the Communist world will outproduce capitalism both in industry and agriculture.

Not bloody likely.