PRESTOPUNDIT -- A Good Blog at a Great Price. Guaranteed.

UPDATE: "Don't know nothin' about h i s t o r y .. ". Magna cum laude Harvard leftie Matthew Yglesias proves once again that the elite universities are failing the country with this deeply ignorant attack on Arnold Schwarzenegger. The simple fact of history is that the Soviets occuppied one quarter of Austria and jointly occuppied Vienna until 1955, when Austria once again became a sovereign country.

A bit of remedial history for our Harvard genius. "During the occupation, the primary objective of the Soviet Union seemed to have been the exploitation of the Austrian economy. Although the Western Allies had successfully prevented the exaction of outright reparations from Austria, they agreed to give the Soviet Union "full and unqualified title" to all German assets in eastern Austria, that is, the part of Austria under Soviet occupation. Soviet leaders put the broadest possible interpretation on the term German assets and dismantled and removed to the Soviet Union much of the movable industrial equipment. Fixed installations were formally confiscated and put into production to serve Soviet interests. When the occupation ended with the signing of the State Treaty in May 1955, the Soviet Union had under its control some 450 firms with 50,000 employees -- some 10 percent of the Austrian industrial labor force."

And this: "Within the limited scope of economic matters left for Austrian determination during the occupation, two major developments carried over into the postoccupation period and had significant influence on the future course of the economy. The first was the nationalization of a large segment of Austria's heavy industry. The second was the establishment of a mechanism for coping with inflationary pressures through joint agreements on wages and prices reached by the representatives of business, agriculture, and labor .. Although the Soviet Union objected to the nationalization laws insofar as they applied to former German properties, the other Allies were able to override Soviet efforts to block these laws. The Soviet Union did prevent their application in the Soviet Zone. As a result, about half the enterprises there, including the entire petroleum industry, were kept from Austrian control until after the occupation ended."

For the years 1945 and 1946 the situation in the Soviet Zone was even worse: "Birgit Schwarz .. recalled the situation that prevailed in 1946 .. the country was effectively governed by Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union. Each occupation zone was for all intents and purposes economically autonomous and each was loosely attached to the respective occupation areas in Germany (U.S. and France), Italy (Britain) and Hungary (USSR)."

UPDATE: James Joyner has more. Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack