The buying of fishing vessels accords with the shortage of food in the Soviet bloc. Mikoyan in his October speech admitted there had been many complaints about the fish supply and that the Soviet fishing goals had not been met. But the Soviet search for ships could not be viewed entirely in the light of a desire to produce more consumer goods. The U.S.S.R. was seeking cargo ships in addition to fishing boats, ordering other marine equipment such as component parts and floating cranes and trying to arrange for more ship repairs in free-world ports. Western shipbuilders were inclined to be receptive to orders for vessels at a time when ship orders from Western countries were declining. At the same time it was impossible to ignore the fact that Soviet-bloc orders in the West can have the effect of freeing Soviet-bloc shipyards for the building of naval vessels. The campaign to buy ships thus presented the free world not only with more orders but also with a security problem. The development of a Soviet merchant fleet is relatively recent. In 1939 the U.S.S.R. had seagoing merchant vessels totaling only 1,135,000 gross tons. It emerged from World War II with more than twice this tonnage. The main sources of the increase were lend-lease ships from the United States and war reparations. The United States in its lend-lease program leased to the U.S.S.R. 121 merchant vessels with gross tonnage of some 750,000 tons. Of these, 30 were returned to the United States and 4 were lost. The U.S.S.R. kept the others, and long exhaustive negotiations since 1946 have failed to settle this and other lend-lease claims. Through war reparations the U.S.S.R. acquired 170 more ships with gross tonnage just over one-half million tons. By 1953 the Soviet bloc--the U.S.S.R. and Poland for the most part--had a seagoing merchant fleet with a gross tonnage of 2-1/2 million tons, compared with free-world fleets totaling about 21 million tons. =Most of All, They Want Hard Goods= The new Soviet purchases of butter, meat, and other consumer items have sometimes obscured the continuing heavy demand for equipment and raw materials needed for industrialization. There has been no appreciable decline in the Soviet interest in buying industrial commodities. Such goods still dominate Soviet imports and new agreements to import--and that goes for the European satellites, too. The Soviet bloc has shifted some of its priorities. The Soviet eagerness to buy ships is an example of a raised priority. The sharp drop in Soviet buying of Malayan rubber from the United Kingdom in 1953 was an example of a lowered priority. There are some other changes, but no change in the emphasis on industrial goods in general.