Soviet Ambassador Research Articles

Fighting anthrax: A cold warrior's confession

A leading Soviet ambassador and arms control negotiator for almost 50 years reveals his knowledge of the anthrax outbreak at Sverdlovsk and derives the lessons learned for the United States and Russia to combat modern bioterrorism.

Culture, Power, and Mission to Moscow: Film and Soviet-American Relations during World War II

Following a sumptuous feast (and copious amounts of vodka), the guests, gathered around a banquet table deep within the Kremlin's walls in May 1943, toasted SovietAmerican friendship. Premier Joseph V. Stalin and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov praised the Grand Alliance. Anastas I. Mikoyan, the Soviet commissar for foreign trade, Lavrenty P. Beria, the head of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Del, NKVD), and Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, offered toasts, and the Anglo-Americans present-including the British ambassador to Moscow, Adm. William H. Standley, the reigning United States representative, and Joseph E. Davies, Washington's former ambassador-reciprocated. The American emissary from 1936 to 1938, Davies was there because President Franklin D. Roosevelt had sent him to arrange an introductory summit with Stalin, a meeting at which Roosevelt was sure all outstanding Soviet-American differences could be ironed out. Although Davies' presence was unusual, thus far the evening had been little different from similar receptions held by Soviet leaders for their Allied comrades during World War II. On this occasion, however, the former ambassador had brought with him a movie that both he and Roosevelt hoped would convince the Soviet dictator to eschew separate peace negotiations with Adolf Hitler and to remain within the tenuous Big Three

Gao gang and the Moscow connection: Some evidence from Russian sources

It has occasionally been suggested that Gao Gang, a leading Chinese Communist Party figure with a political base in north‐east China, had close ties to the USSR which may have led to his political demise in 1954. The evidence for such ties was vague, and their contribution to Gao's downfall debatable. New evidence suggests that Gao may have been closer to the USSR than was thought. Soviet officials who knew Gao personally perceived him as friendly to Moscow, and saw his downfall as possibly an act of revenge by Mao, carried out deliberately after Stalin's death. Further, archival evidence suggests that Mao may have been irritated by Gao's conversations with Soviet figures in 1953, in which he revealed details of internal CCP politics. Mao forcefully expressed his irritation with Gao's behaviour in conversations with the Soviet ambassador, P.F. Yudin. Thus, although there were other factors involved in Gao's demise, the Moscow connection may be more important than was thought. Mao's motivation is not clear, but he evidently tried to avoid any appearance of revenge against Stalin's ‘client’ by comparing the purge of Beria in the USSR and of Gao in the PRC: both parties have a right, perhaps a duty, to purge unreliable elements. His conversations with the Soviet ambassador suggest a more independent Mao, emerging from the shadow cast by Stalin, behaving on the assumption of equal partnership between Moscow and Beijing in the communist camp.

‘A Situation of Delicacy and Danger’: Anglo-Soviet Relations, August 1939–March 1940

In September 1939, only a few weeks after the signature of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact, the British government made perhaps its strongest effort since the Bolshevik revolution to achieve a rapproachement with the Soviet Union. This effort was interrupted and almost ruined by the Finno-Soviet ‘Winter War’, but the British initiative resumed after the war ended in March 1940. The Soviet government, though not the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan M. Maiskii, was cool to British overtures, thus reversing the inter-war pattern where Moscow had often been the first to ask for better Anglo-Soviet relations. The publication of many Soviet diplomatic papers permits a comparison between Soviet and British accounts of important diplomatic meetings, a comparison which illustrates both British and Soviet foreign policy during the early months of the Second World War.

Parables from the Past: The Prose Fiction of Chingiz Aitmatov

James Mozur traces the development of Chingiz Aitmatov's fiction from the early 1950s through the mid-1970s, including Farewell, Gul'sary!, White Ship, Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, and The Place of the Skull. He discusses each major work against the political and cultural background in which it was created and thereby widens our understanding of post-Stalinist Soviet literature. Chingiz Aitmatov was born in Kirghizstan in 1928 and published his first stories in the 1950s in both Russian and Kirghiz. He soon took his place as spokesman for the progressive wing of official Soviet Russian literature, striving for greater openness in Soviet letters and for a new approach toward diverse nationalities. Unlike many other writers, Aitmatov continued to flourish in the cultural tumult following the collapse of the communist state, being appointed to government posts by Gorbachev and becoming Soviet ambassador to Luxembourg in 1991.

‘The Last Great Bourgeois’: on the Plays of Henrik Ibsen

The death of Ibsen in 1906 prompted a number of appraisals of the dramatist by Marxist critics, notably Clara Zetkin, Henrietta Roland-Holst, and George Plekhanov. The most extended of these was Anatoly Lunacharsky's article, ‘Ibsen and the Petty Bourgeoisie’, published in three parts in Obrazovanie, St. Petersburg, Nos. 5–7 (June-August 1907). The central section, ‘Ibsen's Dramas’, is printed below. Born in the Ukraine in 1875, Lunacharsky became a Marxist in his teens and joined the Moscow Social Democrat group in 1899. Arrested for his political activities, he was exiled to Northern Russia, where he wrote his first theoretical treatise, An Essay in Positive Aesthetics. In 1903 he joined the Bolsheviks, but broke with Lenin after 1905, having identified himself with the so-called ‘God-seeking’ tendency. Following the fall of Tsarism in 1917 Lunacharsky rejoined the Bolsheviks, and after the October Revolution he was appointed to Lenin's first ‘Cabinet’ as Commissar for Enlightenment, a post embracing the arts and education. Exceptionally, he retained this position up until 1930, when he became one of the Soviet Union's two representatives to the League of Nations. He died in 1933, shortly before he was due to become Soviet ambassador to Spain. Lunacharsky's published output runs to some 1,500 articles, embracing philosophy, aesthetics, and theoretical and critical writings on all the arts. He also wrote a number of plays, including Faust and the City (1918) and Oliver Cromwell (1920). He was an intellectual of wide erudition and acute critical perception, balancing respect for the old and the traditional with encouragement for the new and the inconoclastic. As Commissar for Enlightenment, he did much to defend the early avant garde's freedom to experiment, making the Soviet Union a power-house of artistic innovation.

Infamous encounter? The Merekalov-Weizsäcker meeting of 17 April 1939

AbstractThis article uses recently released documents from the Soviet diplomatic archives to examine the Merekalov–Weizsäcker meeting of April 1939. It argues that these documents show that western historians have been mistaken in assuming that this meeting was the occasion for Soviet signals of a desire for détente with Nazi Germany. The significance attached to the meeting in this respect is part of the cold war myth that the USSR's negotiations for a triple alliance with Great Britain and France in the spring and summer of 1939 were paralleled by secret Soviet–German discussions which eventually lead to the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939. The article seeks to demolish those elements of the myth that concern the Merekalov–Weizsäcker encounter and to present an alternative interpretation of the provenance and meaning of the so-called political overture by the Soviet ambassador at the meeting.

Editor's Introduction

"After Stalin" is a memoir of events of the 1950s and 1960s written by a self-described "house serf inside the CPSU Central Committee headquarters. While serving as a "consultant" to its Department for Liaison with Socialist Countries, Fedor Burlatskii, now a member of the Congress of People's Deputies and an outspoken advocate of Gorbachev's reforms, worked closely with his department head, Iurii Andropov, later head of the KGB and General Secretary of the CPSU. For countless hours on hundreds of occasions, he sat next to Andropov pouring over drafts of Party documents and speeches to be delivered by members of the Politburo. Burlatskii is thus able to sketch the portrait of a Soviet apparatchik who enjoyed intellectual-political work and who, "in striking contrast" to other Soviet leaders, was kind and affable (at least to consultants). Leaving aside what might have been a less charitable view of Andropov on the part of Hungarian party leaders executed after the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian rebellion prior to which Soviet Ambassador Andropov assured them that Moscow harbored no aggressive intentions toward Hungary, Burlatskii offers several harsh judgments of Soviet political culture. Coarse flattery and the willingness to believe secret denunciations of rivals, he suggests, may be "the distinguishing feature of a Russian political person," even of "the most intelligent and penetrating" leaders. He attributes the authoritarianism of past CPSU leaders to "traditional notions of leadership within the peasant household," ranging from patriarchal infallibility to "intolerance of the opinions of others—all these things together comprised the typical collection of centuries-old ideas concerning power in Russia."

The Elusive Litvinov Memoirs

Conflicting accounts about the autobiographical writings of Soviet Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov have circulated for decades. Some of the confusion can be clarified by an examination of the correspondence of his British wife Ivy Low Litvinov. On 7 December 1941, when Litvinov arrived in Washington, D.C., as the new Soviet ambassador, he was accompanied by Ivy. The American Left, which had lionized him during his previous United States visit to negotiate recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, welcomed both Litvinovs with high enthusiasm in the 1940s. In the United States for the first time, she renewed acquaintance with various American intellectuals, whom she had met over the years in Moscow. Among them was the writer Joseph Freeman, one of the editors of the radical communist journal New Masses.Ivy wrote frequently from her embassy quarters in Washington to Freeman, her closest confidant, who lived in New York. Those letters that have been preserved provide a sense of Maksim Litvinov's tenuous position as a diplomat, indispensable for negotiating with the west but also unmanageable within the Soviet leadership.

Mission to America: Maksim M. Litvinov in the United States, 1941?43

On 7 December 1941, Maksim M. Litvinov arrived in the United States to begin his turbulent and frustrating tenure as the Soviet ambassador. The ambassadorship marked the climax of a diplomatic career that began in 1918, when Litvinov was the Bolshevik representative in Great Britain. Subsequently he had been deputy commissar for foreign affairs in the 1920s and commissar for foreign affairs from 1930 to 1939. As commissar, he had been a leading advocate of collective security as a defense against the expansionism of Nazi Germany. He also had been the chief Soviet negotiator in the talks that led to diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in 1933. He was, in short, a well-known figure on the international scene. As ambassador to the United States, Litvinov had relatively little influence on the formulation of Soviet policy, but he was nonetheless a highly important intermediary between Washington and Moscow. Although his dispatches by no means tell the whole story of the early wartime coalition, they do shed light on some major issues, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt's views on Soviet participation in the Pacific war; the opening of a second front (a pivotal concern for Moscow); and Roosevelt's basic assumption about the roles of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain in the postwar world. Moreover, Litvinov's views on Soviet-American cooperation have an intrinsic interest for historians because he was the foremost advocate of good relations between Moscow and the West. It is highly significant that, although he felt very bitter toward America during much of his tenure as ambassador, Litvinov left Washington convinced that there would be no genuine obstacle to Soviet-American cooperation after the victory of the Grand Coalition.

Progress made toward chemical arms treaty

Seventeen years ago, 40 nations of the world began meeting in Geneva to hammer out a treaty that would ban the production, storage, and use of chemical weapons. Progress at this Conference on Disarmament has been excruciatingly slow. Negotiations for the most part have been dull and routine. But the character and atmosphere of the talks changed a few months ago. Then, the Soviets made several announcements that showed promise for propelling the talks to a positive conclusion. But a small stumbling block has cropped up: France has indicated that it will begin producing new chemical weapons. In February and March, the Soviet ambassador to the conference announced new positions on two troublesome points, and declared that the Soviet Union possesses chemical weapons. A U.S. source who asked not to be named called these declarations constructive behavior on their part. Another U.S. source said the Soviet admission of chemical arms is welcomed as a small ...

Record of a Meeting at the Soviet Embassy in Peking

This is the record of a meeting at the Soviet embassy in Peking on December 2, 1925. The listed participants were Soviet Ambassador Karakhan (who had returned from three months in Europe), Soviet Military Attaché N. M. Voronin, A. I. Egerov, who was soon to become the military attaché, and V. M. Primakov, who used the pseudonym "Henry A. Lin" and succeeded V. K. Putna as chief Soviet adviser to Feng Yü-hsiang. Document F is our translation of the Chinese translation of the Russian document as published under the title,' 'Record of a Meeting Attended by Karakhan and Others at the Soviet Embassy on December 2, 1925, Concerning Interference with China's Internal Political Affairs and Other Problems," in SLYM, III, "KMC," pp. 1-16. Short extracts of the document are given in English in Soviet Plot in China, p. 100, and Mitarevsky, World-wide Soviet Plots, pp. 29, 31-32. The original document was marked "Most Secret."

Yessenin—volpin v. Novosti Press Agency, Tass et al.

Sovereign immunity — Foreign States — Libel actions against Soviet press agencies — Whether Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act 1976 should be given retroactive effect to apply to cases commenced before its effective date — Whether agencies were “foreign States” entitled to claim immunity under the Act — Effect of Soviet Ambassador's certifications that they were, respectively, an organ of the Soviet State and an agency or instrumentality thereof — Whether agencies entitled to immunity under the Act for their activities in publishing allegedly defamatory articles in periodicals distributed in the United States — The law of the United States

Contacts between Soviet ambassador Maisky and Zionist leaders during world war II

Contacts between Soviet ambassador Maisky and Zionist leaders during world war II

Memoirs of a Soviet Ambassador: The War 1939–43 and Memoirs of an Interpreter

Memoirs of a Soviet Ambassador: The War 1939–43 and Memoirs of an Interpreter

American Diplomacy and the Berlin Negotiations

in the failure of diplomatic negotiations. The Berlin problem is so perennial that every attempt at a negotiated settlement of it seems to have a foregone conclusion. Negotiations pertaining to Berlin, however, are as hardy in their recurrence as is the problem itself. On the last occasion of an effort for a settlement, American diplomacy displayed a patience equal to Soviet intransigence. Not that the Kennedy Administration was altogether optimistic of the outcome, but the necessity of the effort was the view with which the United States entered another round of negotiations. On January 2, 1962, Llewellyn E. Thompson, Jr., United States Ambassador in Moscow, met with Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Minister, to explore the basis of possible negotiations. On May 30, 1962, Secretary of State Rusk met with Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet Ambassador in Washington, for the same purpose. No substantial progress resulted in the six-month period between these two meetings, although nine meetings and one formal conference between American and Soviet diplomats occurred.? The question is not only why diplomacy failed, but also why the United States government felt compelled to attempt a settlement in 1962. If the latter question can be answered, perhaps the answer to the former will fall into place. Then an insight may be gained into the impervious character of the Berlin problem. In January 1962 two other governments shared an immediate interest with the United States in the Berlin problem the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany.2 Understanding the basic positions of the three powers is a prerequisite for tracing the course of the negotiations between them. For the United States, the Berlin problem was basically derivative from the general problem of nuclear war. Diplomatic negotiations were regarded as a function of military strategy. Thus, negotiations were initiated to communicate certain American military decisions about the Berlin situation to the Soviet Union. Similarly, the Soviet Union defined its claims in the Berlin problem in terms of what it conceived to be a shift in the world balance of military power due to its new-found nuclear strength. To the Soviets, Berlin was a lever with which to force Western concessions on the German problem as a whole in recognition of the new balance of power. The objective of Soviet foreign policy in Central Europe was to legitimate the division of Germany and thereby detach the

Visit of Mrs Valentina Nikolaeva-Tereshkova

Mrs Valentina Nikolaeva-Tereshkova visited the Royal Society on 6 February 1964 and was received by the President, Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, Officers and Members of Council. She was accompanied by His Excellency the Soviet Ambassador and Mrs Soldatova, Mr Rumyanzev, Military Attache, Mr Bagrichev, Mr Voronin, and Mr Boyarov, Counsellors and other representatives of the Soviet Embassy and of her party. The visit took place during a short stay in London.

Soviet Intervention in the War with Japan

considerable attention from politicians and publicists as well as scholars, and the subject continues to hold great interest for a wider audience than is ordinarily available to the academician. The reasons for this interest are not hard to find. They stem, in part, from the controversies aroused by the Yalta Agreement and the decision to use the atomic bomb in 1945. But more funda mentally they reflect a concern over the mounting tensions of the cold war and an effort to find in our wartime relations with the Soviet Union some explanation for the failure to achieve a just settlement and a lasting peace after the greatest war in history. This emphasis on the controversial political aspects of Soviet involvement in the Far Eastern war has blurred somewhat the military and strategic neces sities. At the time, whether rightly or not, these were the most important considerations in the minds of the Allied leaders, and perhaps in the long run they may prove to have been the most decisive. At any rate, it is these, the military factors that governed American relations with the Soviet Union, that I wish to examine here. Russian interest in the Far East long antedated World War II, but in the period following the Revolution the Bolsheviks had been forced to adopt a passive policy in the region while the Japanese took over Manchuria and much of North China and probed Russian defenses along the Siberian border. After 1939, the Japanese shifted their interests to the south, where the crum bling empires of the British, French and Dutch offered tempting opportunities. The Russo-Japanese Neutrality Pact of April 1941 proved a boon for both countries. It encouraged Japan in its plans for southern expansion by assuring Soviet neutrality in case of war with the United States, and it gave Russia similar assurances in the event of a German attack. As George Kennan re marked, the two countries ?one being confronted with great opportunities, the other with great dangers?agreed for the moment on a moratorium in the rivalry over East Asia.1 Two months after the Pact was signed, Hitler loosed the full fury of the Nazi war machine against his former ally. The Japanese, when the Germans struck, kept their side of the bargain. And when they in turn attacked the United States in December, the Russians kept theirs. What ever the reasons, at least each made good on his pledge to the other. Once the United States was in the war, many Americans assumed that the Soviet Union, in common with England and the Associated Powers, would now fight shoulder to shoulder with her Allies against the enemy in Asia as well as in Europe. Notice of this possibility was taken in the press, and on the day after the attack, President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull raised the question with Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Ambassador. At the same time, General Marshall brought the matter up at a staff conference with

Visit of Major Yuri Gagarin

On13 July during his five-day visit to this country Major Yuri Gagarin, the first man to be placed in orbit round the earth in a space vehicle, was received by the President and Officers o f the Society in the Society’s apartments. Major Gagarin was accompanied by His Excellency The Soviet Ambassador M r Soldatov, Lieutenant-General N. P. Kamanin, Colonel N. N. Denisov, M r Romanov, Mr Pavlov, other members of his party and representatives of the Soviet Embassy. The President and Officers, having welcomed Major Gargarin, entertained the visitors to lunch at which several other Fellows were present. After a few words o f welcome by the President, Major Gagarin responded in a felicitous speech in which he made reference to the interest of Soviet scientists in the Royal Society and the work of the Fellows and in particular recalled the Tercentenary Celebrations. He referred to Isaac Newton’s laws of motion as an essential step to his journey in space on 12 April 1961.

Visit of His Excellency the Soviet Ambassador

At the meeting of the Society on 19 November 1959 His Excellency the Soviet Ambassador [Mr J. A. Malik) visited the Society for the purpose of presenting Certificates of Election of Foreign Membership of the Soviet Academy of Sciences to three Fellows of the Royal Society: Sir Cyril Hinshelwood, P. R. S., elected 1948; Professor P. A. M. Dirac, elected 1931; and Professor D. M. S. Watson, elected 1932. In presenting the Certificates the Ambassador stated: Mr President, Fellows, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have been given a great honour today. The Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. has asked me to present diplomas to world famous British scientists who have been elected as Foreign Members of the Academy. They are Professor Sir Cyril Hinshelwood, President of the Royal Society, Professor Paul Dirac, the eminent physicist, and Professor David Watson, the eminent palaeontologist. It gives me immense pleasure to carry out this request. Sir Cyril is well known in Soviet scientific circles for his work on the kinetics of chemical reactions, including chain reactions, and on ion reactions in solutions. The last few years, during which Sir Cyril has been President of the Royal Society, have been marked by the development of friendly relations between that Society and the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. Soviet and British scientists are now making more regular exchanges of lecturers in various fields of knowledge; there are exchanges of young scientists and scientific works. Sir Cyril was one of the first British scientists to make his own personal contribution to the development of scientific contacts by accepting into his laboratory a young Soviet scientist, Shilov, who under his direction has carried out valuable research in the field of ion reactions.