Better Late Than Never

Soviet propaganda had stepped up the pace of its proof that a depression in the U.S. is just around the corner. With a little imagination, Russian newspaper readers could already see the nefarious U.S. capitalists selling apples on drafty street corners. Among Russia's bigwigs only 70-year-old Eugene Varga, once considered the Soviet Union's foremost economist, did not join the chorus that was sending the U.S. to the wringer.

Three years ago Hungarian-born Eugene Varga wrote a book which, although violently hostile towards America and Britain, held that there was no likelihood of a depression in the Western countries before 1955. About a year later, the Politburo realized what Varga was saying. He had not only contradicted Marx, but blasted the premises of Soviet foreign policy. Party henchmen went to work (TIME, Feb. 2, 1948). He was dismissed from his job as head of the Academy of Science's Institute of World Economics and World Politics. He was told to recant. Instead, he pluckily announced: "I cannot follow the advice of accepting all the criticism of my work as correct. If I did, I would be deceiving the party, hypocritically saying 'I agree with the criticism,' when I do not agree."

Then his inquisitors got tougher. His former fellow academician, K. V. Ostrovityanov, warned: "You must know from the history of our party what grave consequences result from stubborn insistence on one's own errors . . ." Finally, last week, like hundreds of other Soviet intellectuals, Varga decided, things being as they are, it was time to retract. Admitting that he had not "acted cleverly," he dutifully sent in his recantation, for the current issue of Questions of Economics. It sounded familiar--almost as though the Russians now had printed forms for these occasions. Wrote Varga: "I formed a whole chain of errors of a reformist trend--which naturally also means of a cosmopolitan trend--because they beautify capitalism . . . [My errors] have caused great harm and compelled our economists to return to questions long ago correctly solved by Marxism-Leninism...My mistake was that I did not recognize right away that my critics were correct. But better late than never . . ."

The next step in Varga's conversion: he will write a new book correcting all the vicious mistakes of the first.

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