Heresy

At war's end, Hungarian-born Eugen Varga was a major prophet among Soviet economic seers. He undertook to make an analysis of the war's effect on the economy of capitalist countries. After patient study of the portents, he put his conclusions in a book which was not allowed circulation outside a close circle of party potentates.

Varga's findings: 1) no economic reasons now exist for a struggle between Soviet socialism and Western capitalism; 2) there is no likelihood of a capitalist crisis before 1955; 3) capitalist states can, in times of emergency, control profits and regulate monopolies in the national interest; 4) in wartime, the workers' living standards in capitalist states rose 20%; 5) Russia's Eastern European satellites are a weak economic reed, comparatively unimportant to total European recovery.

Coming from a Marxist in Soviet Russia, this was a sensational lot of heresies. Varga not only contradicted Marx, but the premises of Russia's current policy toward the U.S. and Britain. Last week, the U.S. heard the complete & unabridged story of what had happened to the heretic.

Party polemicists pounced on Varga and skinned him alive in various high-toned journals. He was given a chance to recant, but refused. Thereupon he was dismissed from his post as head of the Academy of Science's Institute of World Economics and World Politics. The institute was abolished. Twenty other top Soviet economists were in disgrace along with Varga; their mistake was that they did not listen to a proverb common among embattled Soviet economists: "It is better to defend the government's figures than to go to jail for your own."

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