[I don't stand by every word of this, which I wrote for a book, still
unpublished, about a decade ago. And I don't deal with many crucial issues.
But this is still more or less where I'm coming from. Mark]
The circumstances leading up to the founding of the United Nations
Organisation (UNO) bear recollection. To really understand the debates at San
Francisco and Dumbarton Oaks (and the Big Three Conferences at Tehran in 1943
and Yalta in 1945) you have to contextualise. And what was the context? Well,
let's call things by their names.
The Second World War was a continuation of the international civil war which
had been raging since 1917-1919. It was a war waged by imperialism against
socialism, in a world engulfed by firestorms of anti-colonial struggle and
wars of national liberation, a world still on the threshhold of the abyss
disclosed by the Great Depression, in which fascism was the mailed fist of
imperialism, and not just the unwanted by-product of economic crisis. In the
1930s the Nazis were systematically encouraged by the British and French, just
as the Japanese were given a free hand in China. Evil and unscrupulous,
W.Churchill sought to direct events to maximise British imperial advantage;
and when it suited American interests to support him, F.D.Roosevelt, that
devious, sinister avatar of the US patrician class (its own hands steeped in
the blood of tens of millions of native Americans, its world-view encapsulated
by the hubristic, predatory visions of the Monroe Doctrine) did so: and when
it suited them not to, no bunch of arrogant hypocrites ever sang louder or
more falsely to the Gods of democracy and freedom.
Things hadn't worked out as they were supposed to; by 1944, the prestige of
the Soviet state was at its height, and the Red Army trampled in the guts of
the Wehrmacht. In India, Africa, Latin America and China people saw a
different future, and they knew that the Soviet Union and the world communist
movement was the sword and shield of colonial liberation. Even in Britain, the
people could not wait to kick Churchill from office and took the first chance
that presented to vote him down. In France, Italy and the Balkans, liberation
meant not just liberation from fascism, but liberation from the its
progenitive universe of fear, want, disease and despair.
The world craved peace and a big draught of socialism; people thirsted for
dignity and freedom and no-one who opposed them stood a cat in hell's chance
of election. That was the mood music of San Francisco and Dumbarton Oaks,
which determined relations between the skulking diplomats of imperialism, and
the spokesmen of socialism. That was the crucible in which the United Nations
was forged. It is good to remember how things really were. Miseraable
purveyors of cheap bribes, bitter-enders of chauvinist me-tooism and white
Anglo-Saxon racism, the British and Americans, and their French clients,
looked an uncomfortable lot in the negotiations where at each step of the way
the Soviet delegates raised the great issues of freedom and
self-determination, and the skulkers of Downing Street and Foggy Bottom did
their best to obfuscate, delay, obscure the issues, and hang on to petty
advantage and, above all, to their vast colonial possessions. You only have to
read the minutes of the meetings, and the diaries of the participants, for
these simple truths to strike you with irresistible force. The British and
Americans expected to inherit the earth, once the Germans and Russians
annihilated one another. But it was never going to be like that, and when the
UN struggled into life it was from the first no empty charade like the League
of Nations before the War, but a lusty child of its times, and the times were
above all about decolonisation.
The great updraft of popular emotion, supporting the ideal of a United Nations
Organisation which would be the true harbinger of a new world order based on
peace and social harmony, energised and uplifted Soviet diplomacy. But the
Soviet leadership was under no illusions: under the terms of the wartime
treaty of alliance between the USSR and Great Britain, signed in May 1942,
military resources and technologies should have been pooled, but the British
naturally did not honour this irksome treaty.
The war's greatest innovation, the atomic bomb, was developed in what amounted
to an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy of silence. This British duplicity was hardly
unknown to the Soviets, who, given the prewar British record of shameless
treachery, expected nothing less anyway. Soviet intelligence penetrated the
Manhattan Project and what Roosevelt and Churchill hoped to keep secret from
Stalin, they did not: so the disgusting hypocrisy of their wartime diplomacy
was transparently obvious, and the Soviets had no doubts that behind the talk
of a new world order based on the United Nations Charter and a new framework
of international law, the same old bloodlust and predation was at work. It was
clear from the start that if the UNO worked at all, it would only be because a
great popular alliance of forces, led by the victorious Soviet state, could
put sufficient pressure on the imperialists to make them play by their own
rules. Soviet diplomacy thus faced the dilemma that even in the new conditions
of wartime amity among victor nations, it had to anticipate a hostile postwar
terrain, and act and organise its defences accordingly.
The Cold War could not come as a surprise. The institutions of postwar
international order had to be, as fars as possible, set in concrete when that
day came, so as to deny the enemy as much wriggle-room as possible. These
factors largely conditioned Soviet negotiating stances towards the vexed
issues of the Veto in the Security Council, and other issues. They were
prepared for anything.
As Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet representative at the San Francisco and
Dumbarton Oaks talks, put it: "The foreign policy and diplomacy of a state,
which has a definite social system, stem from the very nature of this system,
or the ideology of the class or classes in power... diplomacy, like foreign
policy, has a distinctive class character. Bourgeois diplomacy makes use of...
the rich arsenal of customs, traditions, norms and methods accumulated through
centuries of international intercourse. .. As Lenin pointed out... the
proletariat, which has come to power must know the methods of its opponent and
use them with equal skill.... Deception, blackmail and dictation... the
stock-in-trade of bourgeois diplomacy, are inapplicable in.. socialist
diplomacy..,[but] knowledge and consideration of these methods as diplomacy
weapons of the bourgeoisie are quite indispensable for a timely exposure and
analysis of imperialist plans and for frustrating them... To shroud diplomacy
in mystery is a favourite bourgeois trick.."
Lenin had said: "In the present world situation following the imperialist war
[of 1914-18], reciprocal relations between peoples and the world political
system as a whole are determined by the struggle waged by a small group of
imperialist nations against the Soviet movement and the Soviet states headed
by Soviet Russia' (CW v.31 p241, 1966 Moscow).
That was true in 1941, and in 1945 too, and it remained true until 1991. Open
and closet warfare permeated diplomacy too; those who love to depict Soviet
diplomats as pathetic stooges of Stalin locked away in fortified isolation in
their missions abroad, afraid to so much as speak to a foreigner. Do not know
the half of it. As American historian Teddy Uldricks put it: Bolshevik
diplomats routinely faced violence from imigri and anti-communist
organisations. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Soviet diplomats were attacked,
murdered or threatened, in Tallinn, Canton, Warsaw, Rome, Lausanne, Washington
and Paris, and Soviet missions were attacked by terrorist gangs in Peking,
Berlin, Konigsberg, Warsaw and Lemberg. Until well after War of Intervention,
most embassies were still staffed by ex-Tsarist staff who spread anti-Soviet
propaganda, were still recognised by host governments, and refused to work
with or accepts the authority of the Soviet government. V. V. Vorovsky,
murdered in Lausanne in 1923, reported to Moscow, 'We live in a state of
seige, our gates are barred, we do not go out needlessly'. In the late 1920s
and early 1930s, Soviet foreign ministry internal politics had revolved around
the feuding between Chicherin and Litvinov - there was a deal of both personal
antipathy and basic policy differences. The feuding at times was bitter.
Litvinov, like Chicherin, was an old-Bolshevik, who knew Lenin well, but he
outranked Chicherin in the Party. Some US observers thought the two men were
appointed to counterbalance each other's strengths and weaknesses. And as the
special ties bet Germany and Russia after Rapallo faded, Litvinov finally won
the struggle against Chicherin. Paradoxically, it was the elegant,
French-speaking Chicherin who misunderstood the new era. He had tried to give
real strategic content to the Leninist notion of peaceful coexistence. But
Litvinov understood the truth: there could only ever be uneasy, short-lived
truces, and the Soviet state could never depend on diplomacy or treaty
arrangements for its security.
Litvinov was the tireless campaigner for systems of collective security
between the wars; but the popular legend that he was committed to containing
Hitler through alliance with the West, and was broken when that strategy
failed, is not correct. Litvinov played the great game with the same elegant
cynicism about Western good intentions as did Lenin and Stalin. Georgi
Chicherin, an aristocrat by birth, who graduated from St Petersburg
University, had already made a career in government service, and enjoyed the
social amenities of his class.
He was a diplomat from a family of diplomats. In 1904, he resigned from
diplomatic service where he was an archivist and scholar, and joined the
Mensheviks. In 1907 he became secretary of the Menshevik foreign Bureau; he
went into exile and was even imprisoned in Britain as a revolutionist, after
the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. He joined Communist Party in 1918.
In March that year Chicherin became first head after Trotsky of Narkomindel,
the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. A shy, timid little man with an
intelligent and gentle glance, negligent of dress, an aesthete, a womaniser
according to some, and a hypochondriac, he had a brilliant mind, sharp
repartee, and an amazing memory that made foreign diplomats wince. It was
Chicherin whom Lenin sent to make peace with the Western powers at the 1922
Genoa Conference; but when Chicherin suggested they needed to make big
concessions, Lenin wired 'send Chicherin at once to a sanatorium'. Peaceful
coexistence had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the light of day.
Maxim Litvinov (born Meyer Wallach in 1876), although an educated man, did not
share Chicherin's advantages by birth. Litvinov joined Social-Democrats in
1898, and became a Bolshevik in 1903. He was expelled from France and then
Britain for revolutionary activities. He was sent to London after the
Bolshevik revlolution, where he was arrested and then exchanged for Bruce
Lockhart, a British spy and diplomat in Moscow.
When Litvinov became ambassador to Washington during the first years of World
War Two, Hull, Acheson and Roosevelt all liked this 'chubby, unproletarian
figure radiating robust and businesslike commonsense' and seemingly with a
westernised mind (Litvinov was a great actor). Acheson said he was:
'Roly-poly, short and voluble, he presented an amusing antithesis to Lord
Halifax' (then British ambassador to US). But Litvinov was a master of his
trade. Unlike even Molotov, whom Stalin planned to arrest and died before he
could do so, Litvinov never lost the trust of Stalin.
His conduct of the Rapallo talks is a case in point. For all the guise of
seeking rapprochement with the West, Lenin's principal purpose was to drive
wedges in the solidifying anticommunist cordon sanitaire. Chicherin and
Litvinov played their parts to the end. NEP encouraged many in the West to
think the Russian revolution had run its course; the Soviet diplomats played
up to these high expectations. War reparations and debts, including Tsarist
debts not honoured by the Soviets were on the agenda. The Soviets wanted open
trade relations and recognition without having to pay up. At Genoa Russia and
Germany were the outcasts, Germany even more than Russia. The Soviets went
with a single-minded intent of splitting the West and of ensuring that Germany
did not get sucked into any cordon sanitaire.
The Germans were anxious to avoid the Allied reparations bill - of 132bn gold
marks! - which had just come in. Since the French had kept the Bolsheviks in
on the reparation claim (they hoped thereby to get the huge Tsarist-era debts
honoured in return) the Soviets had some negative leverage. They played up
their 'secret' joint military mission talks with Germany, for effect (Trotsky
had been holding these talks with Germany since 1919).
The opening of the Conference aroused intense public curiosity- it was the
first time the mysterious Bolsheviks had appeared on the world stage, other
than at Brest-Litovsk where Trotsky had come disguised as a worker with four
token proles in tow - a soldier, a sailor, a worker, and a peasant. There was
great surprise therefore when Chicherin and his team arrived in top hats and
penguin suits. Where were the bomb-throwing Bolsheviki? Chicherin spoke
perfect French, then translated himself into English. It was all sweet reason
and diplomatic niceties. He looked more schoolmaster than revolutionary. But
Chicherin's opening speech was a classic Leninist mission-statement, appealing
over the heads of the bourgeois diplomats direct to the peoples of world. It
was a concise explication of Lenin's concept of peaceful co-existence. This
speech gives the lie to those, Trotskyite and bourgeois alike, who argue that
peaceful co-existence was not practised in Lenin's time. The statement said
that the Soviet government 'will enter into economic co-operation with all the
states which mutually guarantee the inviolability of each other's internal
political and economic organisation'.
Then Chicherin put down the Bolsheviks own reparation demand: 39bn roubles
reparations for the (Anglo-American sponsored) War of Intervention.
Chicherin's opening statement said: 'While remaining faithful to their
communist principles, the Russian delegation recognise that in the present
period of history, which permits the parallel existence of the new and the old
social orders, economic collaboration between the states representing the two
systems of property is imperatively necessary'. Relations should be 'on the
basis of reciprocity, equality and complete and unconditional recognition'.
And at the first plenary, the Soviet delegation called for universal
disarmament, a ban on poison gas and weapons of mass destruction. 'Disarmament
is the ideal of socialism', Lenin had said.
Thus from the first encounter with the capitalist world in a diplomatic forum,
the young Soviet state began a consistent policy of the pursuit of peaceful
coexistence with countries with different social systems, and of disarmament.
But the real negotiations in the sub-committees showed, as George Kennan said,
that 'ideological passion on the part of the Soviet delegation was not at all
incompatible with extremely shrewould and hard-boiled diplomacy'. At the
Conference, the Soviets took advantage of the fact that the Germans were
out-grouped, excluded from informal discussions and generally made to feel
insecure. They therefore agreed to sign the Rapallo Pact (Rapallo was a suburb
of Genoa where Treaty signed). This was not an alliance, only a treaty of
recognition and mutual renunciation of claims, with most-favoured nation
status. Nonetheless, news of the treaty was received in London and Paris with
'utter stupefaction' and a 'crescendo of indignation', as Kennan put it.
Peaceful coexistence was real, it was not a joke, not simply a tactic; but
behind it lay the rationale at the heart of Leninist thinking since at least
1916.
This was the age of imperialist war and of class struggle on the international
plane: of international civil war. Lenin did not expect that peaceful
coexistence could ever be a permanent state of affairs. He did not believe,
and no Bolshevik from Stalin to Trotsky believed, that the USSR could coexist
indefinitely with world capitalism. One or the other would be destroyed.
Peaceful coexistence was designed to postpone war, to enmesh the encircling
capitalist powers in webs of diplomacy and trade and so make war a less facile
option for them. The purpose of peaceful coexistence was to enable the Soviet
power to fight at a time and place of its own choosing. The London Times
called Rapallo an 'unholy alliance' and 'an open defiance and a studied insult
to the Entente Powers'.
Action was demanded 'to teach Germany and Bolshevists alike that the allies
are not to be defied or flouted with impunity. Lloyd-George thought it 'most
cold-blooded German treachery'. The treaty drove a deep wedge between Germany
and the Allies. Kennan admitted it was a triumph for Soviet diplomacy. It
showed the power of diplomacy as a tool in the hands of the revolutionary
state. Rapallo ended Soviet isolation in Europe, and breached the cordon
sanitaire. It created a pattern of negotiation and a momentum of recognition,
trade deals, cultural exchanges and the like. In striving for maximum effect,
Chicherin and his fellow negotiators outwardly adopted the style and protocol
of European diplomacy, and by attire, demeanour, and speech melted into the
European diplomatic scenery. And Chicherin's opening speech was seen as
typifying what became a normative Soviet approach: the use of an international
platform to give Soviet policy global exposure. Wilson's 'open diplomacy' was
all style and no substance; but Lenin's appeals to the masses over the heads
of their rulers, remained as subversive and worrisome as ever.
This raises what became a fundamental issue. In his book "Diplomacy and
Ideology", Uldricks seeks to contextualise what was generally seen as Soviet
secrecy and paranoia by pointing to its difficult origins: while the first
Soviet Commissar for foreign affairs, Leon Trotsky, publicly tore up the
secret treaties and while Lenin proclaimed a truly open, 'people-to-people'
diplomacy, other forces were at work: the drive to 'contain' communism began
with the struggle to contain this revolutionary, subversive kind of new
diplomacy. How much easier it was for well-fed and caparisoned American
diplomats, or for sleek, comfortable Britons, to adopt the new rhetoric of
openness, from within their well-guarded and fabulously well-endowed missions.
The Soviets called their diplomacy uniquely open, honest, peaceful and
humanitarian. Uldricks does not dismiss these claims in cold war terms as mere
lies, but makes a case of sorts for calling Lenin's would-be nemesis, Woodrow
Wilson, a better champion of open diplomacy and appeals to the peoples. Wilson
spoke much of extending democratic ideals from the national to the
international arena, of egalitarianism, public negotiations, open summitry,
and of making attempts to use and influence public opinion. (loc. cit. p.153).
Open diplomacy was not such a novelty as Trotsky claimed, actually: it had
been promoted by the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, and before that
Genghis-khan invaded Persia because he objected to the shah's secret treaty
with China; indeed, even Entente diplomats after 1917, when they refused to
recognise the Bolshevik government and appealed direct to Russian people
against, it, insolently imitated Lenin's own tactic. Open diplomacy was never
more than a tactic in Lenin's hands, either, once the failure of the German
revolution and the isolation of the Soviet regime become obvious after 1919.
In 1922, Chicherin had written in the journal Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn about the
role of the Comintern and compared it with the work of the Foreign Ministry:
"The Communist Party stands at the head of a great government As a government
it enters into relations with all other governments ... guarding the vital ...
interests of its republic. It conducts a state policy determined by the
interests of the workers. State policy and party policy are strictly
separated. Speaking in the name of the government organs we leave the second
aside. The fate of the communist movement, the success and experience of
Communist Parties, belongs in the realm of other organs. Our attention is
given to the fate of the Soviet government'.
Anti-propaganda clauses featured in Soviet treaties, starting with
Brest-Litovsk in 1918.In 1923 the Soviet and British governments exchanged
notes and the Soviet Union promised 'not to support financially, or by other
means, persons, agencies, organisations or institutions which have the aim of
spreading disaffection, or supporting rebellion in any part of the British
Empire'. And the Soviet government closed its school for propagandists in
Tashkent, curtailing the Council of Action in Baku which had supported the
work of Indian communist leader M N Roy. Soviet diplomats were instructed not
to do propaganda work. Raison d'etat made the Soviet foreign service more
important than the Comintern, which swiftly degenerated. The post-1937 purges
of the diplomatic service thus only reaffirmed an existing trend, which was to
deepen the proletarian make-up of the Soviet state while simultaneously
strengthening it and entrenching it; the period of World Revolutionary elan
had long since been displaced and in the era of open counter-revolution and
blackest reaction, the task was to defend the gains of October even at the
price of reinstalling many trappings of the ancien regime; this was the
reality of the Soviet Thermidor. As many as two-thirds of Foreign Ministry
personnel (including diplomats) went in the purges. A small proportion of
these were sent to the camps or shot.
The Purges show Stalin hitting at pro-Germans like Krestinsky, just as he
struck down the Germanophiles in the army command, while the Germanophobes -
Maisky, Kollontai- survived. For more than a year the cleanisng process
brought normal functioning of Narkomindel to a seeming halt: but as Uldricks
and many others have observed, when push came to shove the purged foreign
service proved to be just as nimble and adept as ever. Uldricks says that the
1939 German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact was 'an extremely delicate affair
handled with great skill by the Russians' (p. 175).
It was Hitler, the record shows, who was constantly outmanoeuvred and
struggled to keep up: that changed only with Barbarossa, but that was, Stalin
thought, an act of complete madness, which is why it was so unexpected. Among
the few Soviet diplomats and ambassadors to survive the purge were Litvinov
and his deputy, Vladimir Potemkin; Alexandra Kollontai hed her post in the
Sweden embassy, Ivan Maisky in Britain, Troyanovskii and Umanskii in
Washington. Litvinov was replaced as Commissar by Molotov in 1939, but found
his way back as Washington ambassador in 1941-43, when he was replaced by
Gromyko (but Litvinov's extraordinary career as diplomat and spy was far from
over even then). Thus, by the end of 1943, the Chicherin-Litvinov generation
of Soviet diplomats had almost entirely passed from the scene and a new,
Stalinist Narkomindel emerged, flooded by eager, inexperienced recruits. The
average age of high-ranking Narkomindel officials who were purge victims was
55 years; new generation, 33 years. In its early years Narkomindel had drawn
70% of its personnel from the middle-class professions (in Soviet style,
statistics were kept: workers=9%, peasants=5%). After the purge, the majority
of foreign service personnel were from worker or peasant backgrounds.
In the 1920s Narkomindel diplomats had generally been the alumni of leading
Russian, American and European universities; after 1939, many had no
post-secondary education at all and those who did were typically from
technical institutes. Under Chicherin-Litvinov most came from the from
revolutionary intelligentsia; almost half were Old Bolsheviks (many secondary
officials hailed from the Tsarist foreign service).
These men were genuine intellectuals and cosmopolitans. The 'Gromyko Cohort'
was a sharp contrast: typically they were young teenagers in 1917 and spent
their formative years during the NEP; few had foreign languages, fewer had
travelled. They came from careers in industry, education, the military, or
other branches of government and party apparatus. Andrei Gromyko had been a
Senior Research Associate in agricultural economics at the Institute of
Economics of the Academy of Science. Many new-minted diplomats had joined the
Party quite recently. As a result of the purge the new men did not have chance
to begin in lesser positions and get valuable in-service training under
tutelage of long-service diplomats. Not surprisingly, the novices foundered on
occasion, and had the hyper-cautious attitude to diplomacy that exasperated
foreign colleagues. But they soon showed their mettle, and those who had to
deal with them both during the war and afterwards, in the great series of
meetings which birthed the UN, Bretton Woods, and the postwar order, soon
learned to respeciallyt their Soviet opposite numbers. Gromyko was the
archetypal representative of this generation. Graduating as an economist, the
young Gromyko, still dreaming like many contemporaries of becoming an aviator,
began work as a teacher and researcher in agricultural economics. In later
years Gromyko would publish learned works in economics, including 'The Export
of US Capital', 'US Dollar Expansion', and, in 1982, 'The External Expansion
of Capital'- reflecting his early interest in the unity of the world market
and centre-periphery relationships. In 1939 Gromyko - who learned English in
his spare time, following Stalin's dictum to 'emulate American efficiency'-
was called right from the lecture hall to the Kremlin to meet Molotov and
Stalin. Setting him to work in Narkomindel, the Foreign Ministry, Stalin
explained that Gromyko will soon be sent to Washington as a diplomat.
In November 1939, Gromyko leaves Moscow with his young wife and Konstantin
Umansky. They were to travel from Moscow by train, through a devastated and
smouldering Poland, newly-occupied by Nazi Germany, and via Berlin. It was
rumoured then and later that Stalin himself was on-board that train and that
he met Hitler somewhere in occupied Poland. I believe that this meeting did
not take place, but that Gromyko did indeed meet Hitler, in Berlin; I had this
story from more than one Narkomindel old-timer.
Gromyko travelled on through Italy and then on an Italian liner, the Rex, to
New York. Now that Litvinov was demoted, he would report to Vyacheslav
Molotov, an Old Bolshevik, but cast in the same mould as himself. Molotov, who
was actually the nephew of the great composer Scriabin, was another Soviet
diplomat whom people under-estimated at their peril.
Meeting Goebbels in Berlin in 1939, to negotiate the renewal of the
Non-aggression Pact, discussions were tense and the Germans inclined to
overplay their hand: according to Goebbels and Ribbentrop, the war was all-but
won and the British were already defeated. Suddenly the talks were suspended
because of an air-raid. As they withdrew to a bunker, Molotov icily wondered
aloud to Goebbels just whose bombs they were hiding from, in that case?
Molotov was the 'iron civil servant' who moulded subordinates in his image,
especially Gromyko. Molotov meant to eradicate the casualness of both Tsarist
and Chicherin-Litvinov eras.
With his pince-nez and pedantic fussiness, he was known by western dip's as
'Auntie Moll'. Lenin called him 'the best filing clerk in Russia'. Radek
called him 'Stone-bottom'; Churchill said he was carved of cold Siberian
granite, a man of 'outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness'. Paul
Schmidt, a German diplomat, said he spoke with 'unerring logic.. in his
precise diplomacy he dispensed with flowery phrases and, as though he were
teaching a class, gently rebuked the sweeping vague generalities of Ribbentrop
and, later, even of Hitler'.
Roosevelt found Molotov strange and difficult to cope with, a new phenomenon
he had never before encountered, without the 'Western kind of mind and an
understanding of the ways of the world Roosevelt knew', unlike Litvinov. At
their first meeting in May 1942 Molotov was 'unexpectedly frank and amiable ',
which led the Americans to suppose that since Mr Stalin wanted something 'very
seriously', Molotov had been told to be nice for a change. Ambassador Standly,
who replaced the egregiously anti-Soviet Steinhardt in Moscow, liked Molotov
who made him welcome and was always scrupulously kind and correct.
Completely humourless, dedicated to Party principles, and wholeheartedly
loyal to the boss, Roosevelt's interpreter Chuck Bohlen said of him: 'Like
almost all Soviet leaders, a man of mystery... tried to be affable, but had
hard time smiling.... careful, sober negotiator, epitome of the Soviet
bureaucrat. The perfect assistant to Stalin; 5'4" tall, fitting the pattern of
associates who would not physically dominate the dictator. Methodical,
well-briefed, would carry out orders even if they seemed ridiculous to others.
Stalin made policy, Molotov executed it. ... I never saw him pull off a
delicate manoeuvre; it was his stubbornness that made him effective.' He was a
true believer, methodical, precise, logical, ruthless, fiercely realistic,
cold and calculating, able, follower of orders, loyal. A dedicated Communist
believer whose speech was permeated with the flavour of Marxist-Leninist
verities and who wanted to achieve its single-minded purposes. A tough
negotiator, Molotov won grudging respeciallyt from his diplomatic adversaries.
He, too, was to play a key role in the epic foundation of the UNO; another
thing he'll never be forgiven for.
But the real unsung hero was 'Iron-arse' Gromyko, 'Grim-Grom' as he became
known, 'Mr Nyet' to the tabloids. In 1985 I conducted a series of interviews
with Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a former British premier and Foreign Secretary and
one of the West's longest-serving apparatchiks. I replayed the tapes the other
day. A charming, personable, diffident man who only really enjoyed
salmon-fishing on his Scottish estates, Douglas-Home had only one competitor
in the world's diplomatic longevity stakes and that was Andrei Gromyko, still
then Soviet Foreign Minister. Douglas-Home had served as Neville Chamberlain's
Parliamentary Private Secretary and was with him in Munich in 1938 -- that's
how far back he went, although he was still the UK's foreign minister in 1974.
Although a deeply honourable man, Douglas-Home (pronounced "Hume") never quite
lived down the stain of association with appeasement. What's more, I suspect
that he never found it in his heart to betray Neville Chamberlain, his
erstwhile mentor.
Appeasement was ugly, but what if it succeeded? Hindsight is a wonderful
thing; but you look at Chamberlain, about to board the plane, pluckily quoting
Shakespeare: "From this nettle, danger, we shall pluck this rose, peace".
Hotspur said that before the ghastly battle of Shrewsbury, where ghosts of
slaughtered thousands still congregate in chilly hollows. It was the first
time Chamberlain set foot in a plane. What he did was unforgivable,
dishonourable, but he was a man out of his time.
So Douglas-Home knew Hitler, negotiated with Ribbentrop, and reeked of the
cut-glass era of pre-war British politics. Gromyko and he were peers. In his
memoirs Gromyko recounts how incoming US Presidents asked him about their
predecessors: FDR, Truman, Eisenhower. Grim-Grom was one of the few still
around who remembered. Douglas-Home was another. From 1944 they were key
negotiating partners in the San Francisco and Dumbarton Oaks talks. By then
Gromyko was a habitui of Washington bright life, but of Svetilovichi, his
birthplace, was smouldering ruins, his parents executed by the Nazis. His
younger-brother Fyodor was brutally tortured, escaping to join a the partisans
and died during the Red Army's forcing of the Dniepr. His elder brother Alexei
was killed in battle. Roosevelt often invited Gromyko to breakfast with him;
the president lay in his bed, smoking, the trademark cigarette holder in his
hand; Grim-Grom perched on the edge of the bed. They talked about the post-war
settlement. Roosevelt seems to have genuinely warmed to the slender, nervous,
brittle Russian.
Besides, he needed all the help he could get. No-one knew how to deal with
Stalin, his inexplicable mood changes, his cordiality following with terrible
anger or just plain orneriness with bewildering suddenness. In December 1941
the Germans were at the very gates of Moscow. The Sovietss must be desperate,
surely? A good time to press home an advantage, no?
Roosevelt sent Averell Harriman to find out. Churchill sent Anthony Eden. No,
actually. Stalin was inflexible, unyielding. What about the postwar frontier
with Poland, then, what about the Baltikum, what about the Kuriles? Stalin
himself raised the issues. He didn't wait to be asked. The Soviet borders with
Finland, Baltikum, Poland and Rumania would have to be revised, even the
future of the Rhineland, Bavaria and East Prussia must be settled, and there
wasn't an atom of weakness, not a complaisant line anyway in the hard set of
Stalin's face.
Yes, the Sudetenland would go back to Czechoslovakia, and there must be
territorial adjustments affecting Turkey and Greece. It made Harriman
light-headed; it was incomprehensible. Pearl Harbor hadn't yet happened and
the US was still not openly at war. Harriman told his diary about Stalin:
shorter and broader than he imagined, the generalissimo had a heavy black
moustache, speckled with grey, wore a simple non-decorated tunic,
mottled-brown. A man of few words, detached till became interested then 'he
showed strong attitudes, sometimes emotion, at times brutally blunt, at others
emphatically frank.'
Sometimes Stalin evaded eye-to-eye contact, but if he wanted to see your
reaction he 'looked straight at you with a cold and penetrating stare'. While
Litvinov ponderously translated Harriman's words, Stalin doodled, 'draw[ing]
pix of wolves and then fill[ing] in background in red.' He often handled
complex talks alone, without any advisors, without any sign of a brief: his
memory was phenomenal, terrifying, his ability to marshal arguments, present a
case, to persevere relentlessly with his chosen position, his quickness of
mind, left the expected impression on his American interlocutors: both Hopkins
and Harriman told Roosevelt that Stalin was the only one who mattered, never
mind that he hung around at the back of meetings, drab, inconspicuous, never
mind that he talked all the time about the Presidium, which he had to consult,
which guided his hand. FDR himself said: 'There can be no doubt that Stalin is
the only man to deal with in foreign affairs. Dealing with others without
previous instruction from Stalin was almost a waste of time.'
His behaviour was intentionally intimidating, all that ostentatious doodling
of wolves with their intimidating implications and unstated meanings. But main
thing, of course, was that Uncle Joe concentrated in himself the power of
decision. Stalin's style: cordiality intermixed with bullying and outrageous
insults: became a trademark of Soviet diplomacy. ('You British are cowards,'
he coolly told Winston: 'I can't understand you at all; in 1919 you were so
keen to fight and now you don't seem to be at all! What happened? Is it
advancing age? How many divisions do you have in contact with the enemy? What
is happening to all those 2 million men you have in India?'
Churchill's sang-froid deserted him; he stormed from the room. Stalin went
after him with Elliott Roosevelt, and threw an arm round Churchill's shoulder:
'Just kidding,' he said. That was at Tehran, 1943; meanwhile British and
Russian officers went arm in arm through the souks buying all the things you
couldn't get back home, starting with coffee; and the Germans plotted to send
Skorzeny to off the Big Three in one go). How the Yanks hated it. How they
railed to their diaries about the 'excessive organisational discipline' on the
Soviet side, which 'lost precious time,' and how 'binding bureaucratic
control' was a 'problem of the first magnitude '; whereas we Americans, 'by
nature free-wheeling organisational activists, imbued with a spirit of
individualism and unburdened by an oppressive bureaucratic system, sought
results...' (Whelan, p117).
No, you could do nothing with them: 'fearful, collectivist' Soviet negotiators
preferred to work safely 'under strict orders from a superior'. There was 'No
flexibility, no feel for the possible, not daring to depart in the smallest
particular from their instructions,' so Dean Acheson moaned; Soviet
negotiators simply did not believe in American good faith, instead they
regarded their US counterparts 'through the distorted prism of the
Marxist-Leninist stereotype', which saw the Yanks as 'capitalist lackeys
[with] a sort of "bleed the Russians white" theory' according to which the US
wanted a weak post-war Soviet Union which it could dominate (how unfair! How
distorted and unreal!). 'Soviet negotiators from top to bottom approached
their opposite numbers on the American side with a certain suspicion. They
tended to impute motives to every suggestion of the American officials'. This
has never been an American attitude to the Soviets, of course: 'Patience
beyond belief was required on the part of the American negotiators' said one
of them, John Hazard.
Co-incident with the endless bitter denunciations by US negotiators and
politicians about Soviet double-dealing, insecurity, intransigence, fear,
paranoia, their crawling sense of inferiority, obsessional secrecy,
bureaucratic rigidity, inflexibility, above all, the USSR's persistent failure
to honour agreements, which meant you had to negotiate compliance after
negotiating the agreement itself, a sort of Chinese water-torture: this is the
sort of judgement made to Secretary of State Cordell Hull even by allegedly
sympathetic Ambassador Standley:
'We must face the realities... the present world struggle has resulted from
the efforts of the Allies to prevent an ideology contrary to their own from
being thrust upon them by the use of military power. When this war has been
won, we will find ourselves facing and equally vital and grim struggle.'
Standley did not consider the Soviets to be one of the Allies, of course.
No-one did, or does.
Like Harriman, like even the 'socialist' Stafford Cripps, he foresaw the
postwar world just as it would be, as they meant it to be: 'an economic
struggle . just as bitter and unrelenting as the military struggle has been'.
You have to wonder just how 'diplomatic, polite' etc would Eden have been if
Molotov had been politely suggesting the USSR should get involved in setting
up an 'Irish Sea' Confederation, and in arbitrating the Irish Question: not to
speak of, say, the fate of India.
But the British never ceased mumbling and mouthing about Poland and the
Baltikum. Standly told Hull 'They're mighty skilfull negotiators, with all the
trumps. They don't ever give anything away, even for something'. Calm,
self-satisfied, complacently sure of their predominance, historically and
politically, the Anglo-Americans evidently adopted an air of insouciant
paternalism to the 'Russkies'.
Thus John Deane, the military aid co-ordinator, felt duly aggrieved when
'singled out to be given in private the abuse' which these well-cut Allied
gebtlement were always so surprised to receive. 'My whipping, ' he said 'was
at the hands of Vyshinsky'. Impressed by the 'serenity of the main
conference,' Deane was 'totally unprepared' for Vyshinsky's 'violent and
vituperative abuse'. Deane said the meeting with Vyshinsky was an
`eye-opener', `the more shocking because ... my first few days in the Soviet
Union had made me believe that were in fact among friends.' Vyshinsky told
Deane `on and on and on' that neither the United States nor the United Kingdom
were seriously opposing Hitler, and that the Soviet Union was not deluded by
[their] false promises of a second front.
The Soviet Union was alone in carrying the war to the Germans and the Western
Allies objected to them receiving what little help Turkey could offer. How
galling, how downright irksome, to be lectured in this way by a `Rooske' (so
Deane called them), whom one had every desire to be helpful (short of opening
a Second Front). At the time there were more than 200 German divisions on
Soviet soil. And apart from their skirmish in southern Italy, no British or
American troops were in contact with German ground forces anywhere.
Meanwhile the British army had nearly 60 divisions in India, not to fight the
Japanese but to garrison the Raj. Deane perceptively reached the conclusion
that the true Soviet purpose was to let the Anglo-Americans know of `their
displeasure with regard to the delay in opening a 2nd Front, and other matters
about which they had been relatively tranquil during the conference in the
interests of harmony'. He is shocked, and no longer believes in the Russians:
'the blatancy of their misstatements makes rebuttal seem so absurd as to be
embarrassing; second the devious approach ....to me.. the sincerity,
friendliness and spirit of co-operation became doubtful indeed.'
But what, actually, were the Soviets supposed to do - how were they supposed
to reproach the Anglo-Americans for the constant dereliction of their sworn
obligations? Churchill whined about the trenches of 1914-18 and the disaster
of Gallipolli. He feared a repetition. Even his own public didn't believe him:
'Russia Bleeds While Britain Blancoes' was the Daily Mirror headline. He spoke
of 'knifing up through the Balkans', a manoeuvre transparently designed to
shore up British positions in the Adriatic and the Mediterranean and limit
Soviet influence in the post-war Middle East. By 1944, when the great round of
meetings at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco was in preparation, Churchill had
stopped worrying about the Nazis altogether: instead he was obsessed with the
spectacle of the Red Army marching unstoppable into 'historic Europe'. A gulf
opened between official Britain and the mood of the masses. People wanted the
Second Front and they were ashamed of the procrastination and cowardice of
their own leaders.
What is particularly striking is that ordinary people were agreed on something
else: they wanted Hitler unconditionally beaten, beaten with no hope of
resurrection; they wanted an end to Nazism and to German militarism, and they
wanted a post-war world with structures and institutions to order a permanent
peace. So people were prepared for sacrifices, so the Soviet call for
unconditional surrender had wide appeal and could not be openly opposed.
Popular Allied unity, at least, was a unity between the peoples of Britain,
the USSR and the United States, unity against the Axis but also against
Churchill and anyone who stood in the way of a maximum common effort against
Germany; no-one was prepared to think of the humiliation of negotiating and
armistice with the Nazis. Except Churchill and his entourage. Now when it came
to setting up the institutions of world governance, the main thought was how
to block the Soviet advance.
Harriman recalled his surprise during a stopover in London in May-1944, by how
far the anti-Soviet rot had spread: Churchill raved and fumed, complained the
Russians 'misunderstood' and that Stalin 'had not met him half way over London
Poles though he had persuaded the latter to accept Curzon line.' But it wasn't
Stalin's fault that the British had issued their absurd 'guarantee' to Poland
in 1939, and it wasn't the British who were saving Polish bacon, either, it
was the Red Army. Even Harriman had to disagree with Churchill: Stalin had no
reason to trust Poles who were still hopelessly influenced by Sosnkowski and
the former Polish military who still dreamt of war with the Soviet Union!
Churchill was unmoved by this (he knew it anyway). Next day Churchill and Eden
had another go at Harriman whose diary notes the `sharp swing in official
British opinion' and reported Beaverbrook as saying `everyone in the British
government was anti-Soviet now'. So when it came to deciding how the UN
Security Council would function, to begin with the Western Allies, under
tremendous British pressure, were adamantly opposed to the Veto. On 21 August,
1944, the Three-Power conference opened at Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington D.C.
Its purpose: to draft a charter for a new international organisation. The work
of the conference showed that the goals of the new organisation were
understood very differently by the USSR and the Anglo-Americans. The Soviets
wanted an organisation which could really maintain international peace and
security, which could act promptly and effectively and would necessarily be
based on Three-Power unity.
Stalin had no illusions about his wartime allies; but he believed that the UN
might provide a framework of institutionalised expectations which might lock
them into good behaviour, especially if, as he expected, the emergent
coalition of interests between the masses in third countries and the Soviet
state, could be developed and used to apply pressure. It seemed obvious that
Britain and other colonial powers would be caught in a post-war scissors
between their democratic pretensions and the clamant demands of their subject
peoples for freedom and self-determination; and the Soviet Union would be a
natural and reliable ally for colonial peoples fighting for national
liberation.
Churchill foresaw western domination of the UN councils, because the idea that
decolonisation might let 'the small birds sing' and produce a massive new wave
of sovereign states who would have no automatic liking for the West. was
unconscionable.
The only danger was of Soviet intransigence, Soviet military power, Soviet
expansionism, and the Soviets therefore could not be allowed the unlimited
licence a Veto would give them. It took a while for the Americans to work
through the implications, but, just as in 1919 many had opposed Wilsonism, so
now the Republicans especially, did not like the idea of any 'outside' body
constraining the US' s freedom of action: so there were plenty who defended
the Veto, as a way of ensuring that the UNO could never force its will upon
the USA. To Churchill;s chagrin, opinion swung round to the Soviet view.
Still, Dumbarton Oaks did not finally settle this qusetion, only put into
abeyance until it could be finally settled at Yalta. >From the Soviet point of
view, everything looked different. The main task of the UN would be to create
genuine collective security arrangements, and prevent any new Hitler's from
emerging from the capitalist womb. The UN's raison d'jtre was to repulse
aggression and maintain peace and security. This Soviet view was to be
reflected in the UN Charter as it was ultimately adopted. Much light was
thrown on the conferees' motives during the interminable discussions about
what was meant by "aggression". The British and Americans didn't want the word
used at all, because `it might cause difficulties': Sir-Alexander-Cadogan,
head of British delegation, said that in many cases two countries went to war
and it was not clear who was the aggressor. Gromyko rejected this thinking
decisively, pointing that one of the UNO's main functions would be to
determine in every given case who was the victim and who the aggressor:
"This will be the sacred duty of the future organisation for international
security", he said. "If we do not speak of it plainly, we shall be making it
easier for a potential aggressor to go about his ugly work". A long debate
ensued. Cadogan said it was not how aggression was defined which was the
important thing, but the new organisations ability to put an end to conflicts,
a curious amoral view. Long debates over which country was the aggressor
would, he said, only waste time.
James-Clement-Dunn a US delegate, said that in many years of debate the League
of Nations had not managed to define aggression. Gromyko started out by
stating the aims and principles of the new world organisation and defining its
structure: 1. Maintaining peace and security in the world; 2. improving
economic conditions and performing related, positive functions; 3. Emphasising
the need for a special role for the founding powers: the USSR, the USA, Great
Britain and China. 4. The main bodies to be a world assembly and a world
council. Subsections contained ideas for the peaceful resolution of
international disputes and measures for maintaining peace and security. The
world council was to be responsible for settling political disputes;
resolutions would be adopted by a two-thirds majority including the votes of
the Four Powers. Section 3 was devoted to military questions: he proposed a
military-staff-committee tobe made up of representatives of the Four Powers;
garrisons were to be stationed in several areas.
The US proposals were equally detailed; they contained ten sections,
including:
1. The general character of the new international organisation;
2. The General-Assembly;
3. The Executive Council;
4. The International Court of Justice
5. Procedures for the peaceful settlement of disputes;
6. The definition of a threat to peace and violations of peace, and action to
be taken in consequence;
7. Regulation of arms and armed forces;
8. Measures in the field of social and economic co-operation.
It was no coincidence that the League of Nations had proved incapable of
preventing aggression - because its founders had seen it as a cover for
preparing an attack on the USSR.
At Dumbarton Oaks the debate on the Veto and voting rights had this issue for
its subtext. The Soviets would not agree to any procedure which did not
guarantee the unity of the 'Big Three' and which might leave them isolated
later on. This was question where serious differences arose. The Soviet Union
wanted genuine security, the US and Britain wanted a tool for achieving their
imperialist aims. Stalin's wartime interpreter, Valentin Berezhkov, was a
Soviet delegate at Dumbarton Oaks and later wrote a book, 'At the Birth of the
United Nations'. In it he analysed the intrigues of the Western Powers, and
the growing friction between the Americans on one hand and the French and
British on the other: the Americans were determined to dismantle the European
colonial empires. Unity between the wartime allies began to disintegrate and
splits grew not just between the Soviets and the capitalist powers, but among
the imperialist states themselves. Many European statesmen expressed doubts
about the Anglo-American formula at Dumbarton Oaks.
The US delegates began to argue amongst themselves. Since the war continued
not only in Europe but in Asia too, and, pending the arrival of the Atomic
Bomb, the Americans were anxious to secure Soviet assistance against Japan, it
was in any case too early to permit the potential split with Stalin to emerge
in public view. Meanwhile support grew in the US Senate for the Veto, since
the lack of one might tie US hands in a future dispute, the occasions for
which were already many. At the same time, the British were obsessed with the
need to dam up the rising tide of popular and socialist currents in Europe.
Everywhere the retreating Nazis left behind radicalised left-wing forces in
control of the devastated former occupied zones. John Winant US London
ambassador, telegraphed Roosevelt on 26 July 1943 that, as Soviet forces
advanced, the US and Britain `might well want to influence their terms of
capitulation and occupancy in Allied and enemy territory'.
The Anglo-Americans preferred monarchist, conservative forces hostile to
democracy and socialism. In Yugoslavia the British had ties with Tito but by
May 1943 they were supporting the royalist imigri government and the Cetniks
of Draja Mihailovich. In Italy the Western Allies opposed the communist-led
partisans and made contact with royalist and conservative groups after Allied
landings there. In France Western policy was to delayed the unity of
anti-fascist forces. The US delayed recognition of the French Committee for
National Liberation and sought control of French overseas colonies; it was
taken for granted thought France would be a second-rate power for many years.
Roosevelt thought France should be regarded as an occupied country under US
and Britain military control. The heroism of the French Resistance and the
firm stance of Soviet diplomacy in support of Committee for National
Liberation forced the US to yield (and this despite the bitterly
anti-Communist, anti-Soviet stance of the Gaullists). But the draft British
and US statements of recognition of the new French government were not
acceptable to the Soviet Union which made its own statement on the matter on
the same day - August 26 1943. Talks at Dumbarton Oaks nearly broke down over
the refusal of Soviet Union to allow future domination of the new
international organisation by US and Britain.
The Veto issue encapsulated everything else at stake. Roosevelt sent a
personal message to Stalin about it: `one issue of importance only apparently
remains on which we have not yet reached agree. This is the question of voting
in the Council. We and the British feel strongly that in the decisions of the
Council parties to a dispute should not vote even if one of the parties is a
permanent member of the Council whereas I gather from your Ambassador that
your Government holds a contrary view'. Characteristically, Roosevelt
sanctimoniously claimed he could not abandon the US position, because smaller
nations might see the Soviet position as an attempt by the big powers to stay
above the law: `I hope for these reasons', he concluded `that you will find it
possible to instruct your Delegation to agree to our suggestion on voting. The
talks at Dumbarton Oaks can speedily be concluded with complete and
outstanding success if this can be done'.
But Roosevelt's intervention did not lead to a solution. Stalin reminded
Roosevelt of his own previous proposal for a special voting procedure and the
Soviet delegation vigorously opposed the Western powers' attempts to shuffle
aside the related question of defining aggression. Gromyko pointed out it was
precisely the lack of a clear definition of aggression that had prevented
League of Nations taking measures against past violators of peace. The League
of Nations had encouraged the fascists with its many loopholes. After a
sometimes heated discussion, the Dumbarton Oaks document did not firmly define
aggression, but it mentioned `acts of aggression'. It was a stand-off which
haunted the UN's debates and often paralysed its capacity to act in the years
ahead. The US and British delegates argued that the general rule of unanimity
should not be applicable if the dispute involved the interests of one of the
permanent Council members. The Soviet side adamantly opposed them: to deny
them the Veto would leave them at the mercy of the imperialist states.
American pressure mounted: Edward Stettinius, head of US delegation, said
(wrongly) that the US senate would never approve a document which allowed a
party to a dispute to vote on it. He even went so far as to declare that the
Soviet Union's `rigid' position might stop the UNO from being formed at all,
since smaller countries would never accept the Soviet position. Such hypocrisy
no doubt served only to stiffen Soviet thinking. The ensuing press furore was
damaging to the allied cause but the Soviet delegation stood firm. Gromyko
said there could be no exceptions to the principle of the unanimity of great
powers: this was fundamental, and only 'natural great powers should have a
special position in the organisation since they were mainly responsible for
preserving the peace.' Small countries would accept this: 'the great powers.
bear the main responsibility for the security of nations,' Gromyko said, and
'their successful co-operation during the war and their present struggle for
the security of mankind will be of great significance for the maintenance of
peace in the future.'
The Veto was important precisely because there was no real basis for post-war
unity, either among the imperialist states or between them and the Soviet
Union. The West wanted to use smaller states as pawns, a fact which the
rhetoric of democratic inclusiveness could not hide. Soviet policy was based
on stark realities: unless the Great Powers were bound hand and foot into the
system of collective security, the UNO would inevitably disintegrate and
become a plaything of shameless colonial intrigues, as had the League of
Nations.
It was not Great Power chauvinism which lay behind Soviet insistence on the
special role of the Security Council so much as the imperative need to lock
the imperial predators into the global framework of collective security. The
Western states chafed against those fetters throughout the whole Cold War
period; the US in particular did everything it could undermine the authority
and legitimacy of the United Nations and became a shamelessly delinquent
non-payer of its contractual dues; and when the USSR disappeared, the Western
powers immediately began to dismantle the post-war framework of international
law and to seek to substitute Nato (the rich world's private army) for the
UNO. In reality, the postwar era was merely another phase in the relentless
war against communism which the capitalist states had waged since the October
Revolution in 1917. The United Nations Organisation did not and could not
escape this underlying and all-determining reality.
There could be no better evidence for the progressive intent behind Soviet
policy than subsequent Western attitudes. The Soviet proposal stressed that
the leading role inthe new organisation would go to the powers which had
borne burden of anti-fascist fight. They would be chiefly responsible for
maintaining peace. Their unanimous vote was required for the adoption of
resolutions. The Soviets called for the creation of international armed
forces. The British and US proposals also emphasised the all-embracing
character of the new organisation, but despite the superficial similarity,
even a preliminary comparison showed the fundamentally different conceptions
behind the draft charters. The Soviet priority was to the basic task of
repulsing aggression and this concern for maintaining peace and security was
duly reflected in the UN Charter as finally adopted. Few now remember the role
played by the Soviet Union.
Mark Jones
_______________________________________________
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