THE CABINET: Overture to Moscow

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Since the Russian Embassy in Washington was vacated by the last Imperial envoy, 16 years have passed. In 1919 a favorable report on Bolshevik Russia by a young diplomat named William Christian Bullitt was rejected by Woodrow Wilson in Paris; no one believed Bullitt when he insisted that the Bolsheviks would remain in power. A roly-poly Russian named Maxim Maximovich Litvinov was refused a visa when Lenin appointed him Soviet Ambassador to the U. S.

Nonrecognition of Russia was almost the only Wilson policy to survive the Harding landslide. It deviated sharply from the diplomatic custom of recognizing de facto any stable Government which accepts the usual international conventions.* President Roosevelt's overture to Moscow last week was regarded in Europe as a triumph for Russia: recognition at last. For President Roosevelt it was two or three triumphs: 1) Never before had the Soviets agreed to discuss differences with a sovereign power before their own sovereignty was recognized. 2 ) Upon excited Europe and the Far East (though Japan loudly professed to see in it nothing admonitory) the drawing together of Russia and the U. S. must have a quieting effect. 3) The quieting effect upon U. S.-domestic excitements was instant and undisputed. For William Bullitt, now special assistant to the Secretary of State, it was also a triumph: weeks of quiet negotiation by him and by John Van Antwerp MacMurray, who is apparently slated to turn in his Latvia-Estonia-Lithuania portfolio and become Ambassador to Moscow, led up to last weeks exchange of letters.