POWER POLITICS: Try, Try Again

• Share

When seven deputies of the convening Supreme Soviet last week introduced a motion inviting Foreign Commissar Viascheslav Molotov to deliver a speech at their last session, Moscow's foreign correspondents and foreign diplomats suspected that something important was up. When the Foreign Commissar accepted the invitation, they were sure. Soviet deputies rarely if ever issue spontaneous invitations, and Foreign Commissars certainly do not agree to talk out loud without first talking it over with Joseph Stalin.

On the night that Comrade Molotov rose to speak the Kremlin was jammed with important personages. The diplomatic galleries were filled. Comrade Stalin and his ministers sat in Government boxes. And listening in was a larger audience: world statesmen and the world's people.

After years of being treated with indifference, the U. S. S. R. was coming of diplomatic age, and the lecture on international morals and behavior that Commissar Molotov delivered was being listened to everywhere with interested respect. It was a brand-new experience for Communists. Joseph Stalin, applauding the speech's points, seemed to enjoy it immensely.

Nothing Doing. Kickoff for Comrade Molotov's speech was the Stop Hitler drive of Britain and France and the negotiations that have been going on since mid-April to get Russia to sign on with the anti-Hitler "Peace Front." To the latest British proposals—proposals which British statesmen had confidently predicted would fulfill all Russian demands—the Foreign Commissar bluntly answered "Nothing doing." But he also said that Britain and France should try again, and told them in plain language just how:

> Britain suggested that the mutual assistance pacts be operative under the general principles of the League of Nations Covenant. Why, asked Comrade Molotov, hedge an alliance with "reservations"? In fact, more than one observer asked why bring into the picture at all a League, which has been notorious for words rather than actions, which has done nothing to stop Fascist aggression?

> Britain and France have already guaranteed the frontiers of Poland, Rumania, Greece and Turkey. Comrade Molotov demanded that three other States bordering on Soviet Russia—Estonia, Latvia and Finland—be included in the guarantees. And here he brought up the entire subject of geopolitics in the Baltic, a sea which Germany in wartime must control to be able to assure herself of shipments of Swedish iron ore needed for her war factories, a sea on which Soviet Russia has a frontage of only 75 miles (see map).