UNITED NATIONS: Sweet & Sour

So far, Russia still stuck to her new line of calculated conciliation.

For the second time in five weeks, Generalissimo Stalin broke the Olympian silence of the Kremlin and spoke soothingly to the world in reply to 31 questions from U.P. President Hugh Baillie. His main points: 1) tension between Russia and the U.S. is not increasing; 2) Russia has not got the atom bomb; 3) Russia finds the presence of British troops in Greece “unnecessary,” is “indifferent” toward the presence of U.S. warships in the Mediterranean; 4) Germany ought to become a political and economic unit.

Next day, Foreign Minister Molotov echoed his master’s voice (with some notably rough overtones). Before a packed house of U.N.’s General Assembly, he kept talking of collaboration between “states of widely different political structures,” seven times urged “peaceful competition” between different social systems. At length, and almost pleadingly, he spoke of Russia’s devastation. He even displayed sparks of humor; he said, of the World Federation of Trade Unions: “Is it proper that it has … the same terms of representation on ECOSOC as … the National Association of Dried Fruits Retailers?” His only concrete proposal was immediate general disarmament.*

But even though the speech was mild (for a Soviet diplomat), it was still based on the infuriating axiom that anything Russia does is manifestly right and good. Molotov denounced U.S.-British “imperialists” as “new claimants to world domination,” railed against “dollar democracy” and “money bags,” charged (falsely) that the Baruch Plan sought a U.S. monopoly on the atom bomb. He displayed colossal but typical impudence when, as executor of one of the world’s most brutal foreign policies, he charged certain circles in the West with using “extreme methods of pressure and violence.” His speech was far sharper than Stalin’s own brief answers. At week’s end Molotov found it necessary to issue a remarkable statement to the Associated Press: “Your remark that ‘there is no complete agreement’ between the answers of the head of the Soviet Government, J. V. Stalin . . . and my speech at the General Assembly . . . does not correspond to the facts. . . .”

*President Karl T. Compton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, former Minister to Norway, the Rt. Rev. Henry St., George Tucker, Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, Robert J. Watt, International Representative of A.F.L., Senator Elbert Thomas, chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, and Ewing Cockrell, New York attorney, in a statement last week also called for universal disarmament, denounced as absurd international machinery designed to prevent only atomic armaments.