Allied High Commission for Austria

Extract

On September 26, 1950, the Austrian cabinet voted to permit the country's cost of living to rise to an approximation of the world level, and to make a compensating increase of ten to fourteen percent in wage levels. Three days later the United States representative (Keyes) charged, with the support of the French and United Kingdom commissioners (Bethouart and Caccia), that the resulting riots in Vienna had been inspired by the Soviet Union which had a) transported rioters in trucks about Vienna, b) refused to permit Viennese police in the Soviet sector to be used to quell the rioting, c) prevented police from removing workers of a Soviet controlled plant from railway yards which they had occupied. These charges were denied by the Soviet commissioner (Tsinev) as slanderous allegations of the western representatives whose countries had been responsible for the riots because of the deterioration of living conditions in Austria as the result of the Marshall Plan.