Under Russian pressure Poland rejects Marshall Plan 70 yrs ago
June 9 marks the 70th anniversary of Poland officially rejecting, under Soviet pressure, the US Marshall Plan meant to revitalize the post-war Europe.
Poland's withdrawal from the plan was announced on June 9 1947 by Poland's Soviet-imposed PM Jozef Cyrankiewicz, who earlier had openly spoken in its favour. Known for his Soviet-subordinated policy, Cyrankiewicz obediently changed his stance towards the Marshall Plan when ordained do so by Soviet strongman Josef Stalin.
Announced on May 5 1947 by US State Secretary George Marshall, the Marshall Plan was an economic revival programme to aid the reconstruction of war-ravaged Europe. Poland and other Soviet-dominated countries were barred from accessing the plan by Moscow.
The plan's announcement on June 5, 1947 effected in an international conference on the project in Paris, invited to which were most European countries, including Poland. Simultaneously, the organisers launched negotiations with the Soviets in an effort to convince them to attend. Although at first the Polish government and the governments of the remaining Soviet bloc countries reacted positively to the Marshall Plan, they were unable to participate in it owing to its rejection by Moscow on grounds of Germany's privileged position in the project.
Soviet strongman Josef Stalin "rewarded" Poland for its rejection of the Marshall Plan by a 5-year trade agreement and a USD 450 million grant, partly realised in grain and industrial facilities.
The USD 17-billion Marshall Plan based on US President Harry Truman's earlier-announced containment doctrine aimed at preventing the spread of communism and Soviet influence. Its guiding idea was that aid in rebuilding European war-torn economies would make them less susceptible to communist ideology.
The plan was launched in 1948, in all USD 13.5 billion of the plan's USD 17 billion pool were spent on aid to Europe, the main beneficiaries being Britain (USD 3.5 billion) and France (2.7 billion), followed by Italy and Germany, who each received USD 1.5 billion.
The Marshall Plan helped Western Europe revive economically, successfully weaken communist influences and lay the ground for European integration in the 1948 establishment of the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), which in 1960 became the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Stalin wanted to subject Polish economy to the Soviet central planning system, which proved a failure. In the context of Poland's enormous war damages and loss of around 6 million citizens (17.3 percent of the population), this meant the country's economy, thrusted into "grey ages" of communist rule could not develop in pace with other countries, the effects of which are still visible after 70 years. Additionally, the Soviet Union drained, among others, Polish natural resources (e.g. coal - PAP) for almost 50 years.
Material war damage in Poland was estimated at USD 50 billion (in then rates), and covered practically all economic segments from roads, railways and bridges to industry, infrastructure and tenements. In the non-material sphere especially painful was the loss of a large part of the Polish intellectual elite, murdered by the Russians in systematic operations like the Katyn Massacre (see: NOTE 1), and by Germans, among others, in Special Operation Krakow (Sonderaktion Krakau, see: NOTE 2), as well as in the infamous Nazi-German death camps. Many also died in Soviet labour camps.
After World War II the countries of the Soviet bloc became isolated from the global market and did not participate in international trade, in effect they could not modernise their economies using Western technologies and standards. The effects are still visible today in the backwardness of the Central-East European economies.(PAP)
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NOTE 1: The Katyn Massacre was a series of mass executions of Polish POW's, mainly military officers and policemen, carried out by the Soviet security agency NKVD in April and May 1940. The killings took place at several locations but the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest in west Russia, where some of the mass graves of the victims were first discovered.
The massacre was initiated by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria, who proposed to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps. The victim count is estimated at about 22,000. The executions took place in Katyn Forest, the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons, and elsewhere. About 8,000 of the victims were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, the rest were Polish intellectuals, deemed by the Soviets to be intelligence agents and saboteurs.
In 1943 the government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in Katyn Forest. When the London-based Polish government-in-exile asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Stalin promptly severed diplomatic relations with the London-based cabinet. The Soviets claimed that the killings had been carried out by the Nazis in 1941 and denied responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the perpetration of the massacre by the NKVD.
NOTE 2: Operation Krakow was a Nazi German operation aimed against academicians of Krakow's renowned Jagiellonian University and other higher schools in the city at the outset of World War II. Part of a broader plan to exterminate the Polish intellectual elite codenamed Intelligenzaktion (Operation Intellectuals), Operation Krakow resulted in the imprisonment and deportation to concentration camps of 184 Jagiellonian University academicians, some of whom were later released.(PAP)
