The Vishinsky Approach

(See Cover)

Over the clipped green fields of Flushing Meadow last week, only a few miles distant from the hazy skyline of Manhattan, the encircled flags of U.N.'s 55 nations flapped fitfully in a bland September breeze. Within the limestone and beaverboard temple of U.N.'s General Assembly had gathered the delegates of almost all the world's powers, great, middle and minuscule. Their agenda bulged with more than 60 issues and proposals--from The Bomb to how to make life more comfortable and diverting for visiting delegates.

But in reality there was only one great issue in the minds of the men of U.N., and, speaking strictly, it was not even on the agenda. It was simply whether the men & women who have suffered the horrors of two world wars in 30 years could manage to live out their natural lives in peace.

Since World War II ended, the odds on peace had chillingly narrowed. U.N.'s Security Council could find no way, for instance, to stamp out powder trains like the one that was sputtering in the Balkans.Twenty Soviet vetoes in a year and a half had left the Council feeling both impotent and irritable. Russia refused to meet the majority on plans to control the atomic bomb.

Pathetic Fallacy. In the world beyond Flushing Meadow and the U.N. agenda, there was creeping crisis on a global scale--in Asia, in Europe, and in the minds of many men. Peace treaties had indeed been signed with Italy and other Axis satellites, but the countries still faced questions as grave as any that had been settled. No treaties with Germany and Japan were in sight. It had been Franklin Roosevelt's Grand Design, epitomized in his gamble at Yalta, that the West could reach an understanding with Soviet Russia. In continuation of the wartime alliance (and in exchange for a Western wink at Moscow's absorption of millions of hapless non-Russians and 275,000 square miles of territory for greater "security"), the Kremlin was expected to cooperate in the world's steep climb back toward recovery and peace. The U.N. Charter had been signed in such unrealistic hope. For One World was the 20th Century's pathetic fallacy. Since the war's end there had been two worlds-- one (the greater one) headed, by reason of its unparalleled power, by the U.S., which craved nothing so much as universal, permanent peace; the other, consisting of Russia and her satellites, dedicated by reason of its revolutionary doctrines to the eventual conquest of the peace-loving world.

Mighty Opposites. Last week these mighty opposites defined the issue at U.N. in a clash so dramatic that henceforth only the willfully unrealistic could fail to see it. The protagonists were Secretary of State George Marshall and the spokesman of the Russian delegation, Soviet Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Andrei Yanuarevich Vishinsky. The ultimate issue was peace v. eventual war. The immediate struggle was for control of the soapbox--for that, the Russians had demonstrated, was how they thought of U.N. The question was: How could the peace-loving nations prevent the Russians from using this potential focus of power and international moral rostrum to keep the nations divided and make peace a diminishing allusion?

Now to the assembled delegates Secretary Marshall offered proposals which would in effect pull the veto fang whereby the Russians were able to paralyze the "collective will" for peace, and would set up a Little Assembly which would clear away Russian road blocks. George Marshall had made himself perfectly clear to the delegates at Flushing Meadow. He took his seat amidst crashing applause. Only the Soviet delegates sat silent and heavily hostile. They had lost the ball.

Moment in History. Andrei Vishinsky had intended to make a speech of his own that day. Instead he sent a messenger scurrying to Assembly President Oswald Aranha, of Brazil, to ask for 24 hours delay.

U.N. delegates sensed a moment in history. Next day it came.

Vishinsky's speech stretched to a full hour and a half. He spoke in Russian. Most delegates heard his speech in translation, through earphones clamped over their heads.

The voice, now hoarse, now high-pitched, now menacing, now withering, was the voice of Vishinsky; the hand that manipulated the speaker was the pudgy hand of Stalin. It was a voice new to the U.S. But Europe had been hearing it for 30 years. It was the voice of revolutionary Communism, shouting that Russia was being encircled and calling for the overthrow of capitalism. It was the voice of Prosecutor Vishinsky of the Moscow purge trials, shouting monstrous falsifications as matters of legal fact. It was the voice of Hitler, screaming that Germany was threatened by her smaller neighbors. Delegates who strained for a phrase or a word of conciliation towards the West were stunned by the fury of Vishinsky's excoriation. In the bitterest speech ever delivered in U.N., he gave them what some had heard him saying only in moments of nightmare. Vishinsky was amuck.

He cried:

"Mr. Marshall proposes to establish a standing Committee of the General Assembly under the title of 'the Interim Committee of the United Nations General Assembly on Peace and Security' to maintain 'constant attention' to the work of the Assembly and in order to deal with continuing problems.

"In spite of the reservations in the American proposal to the effect that this committee would not impinge on the matters which are the primary responsibility of the Security Council or of special commissions, there is not the slightest doubt that the attempt to create the Interim Committee is nothing but an ill-conceived scheme to substitute and bypass the Security Council. . . .

"We wish to be sure that the severe lesson given to the aggressive states during the second World War has not passed away leaving no traces, and that the fate of the aggressors severely punished in the last war will serve as a stern warning to those who, disregarding their obligations to develop friendly relations among the nations and strengthen peace and security in the whole world, are preparing both secretly and openly a new war.

"War psychosis instigated by the efforts of the militarist and expansionist circles of certain countries, the United States of America occupying the foremost place among them, is continually spreading and assuming all the more menacing character. . . .

"The preparation for a new war is being carried on literally before the eyes of the whole world. The warmongering propagandists now do not even try to conceal it. They openly threaten the peace-loving nations [i.e., Russia] with war, trying at the same time to shift on to them the responsibility for creating a new hotbed of slaughtering. . . .

"It should be noted that the capitalist monopolies, having secured a decisive influence during the war, retained this influence on the termination of the war, skillfully utilizing for this purpose governmental subsidies and grants of billions of dollars as well as the protection they enjoyed and still are enjoying from various governmental agencies and organizations. This is facilitated by the close connections of the monopolies with Senators, members of the Government, many of whom very often are either officials or partners in the monopolistic corporations. . . ."

Vishinsky then named nine U.S. "warmongers" with a thumbnail indictment of each. Among them: Virgil Jordan, president of the National Industrial Conference Board; George H. Earle, former governor of Pennsylvania and U.S. Minister to Bulgaria; Charles Eaton, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs; Senator Brien McMahon, former chairman of the Senate Committee on Atomic Energy; Senator C. Wayland Brooks of Illinois; Paisley B. Harwood of Cutler-Hammer, Inc. (electric equipment). No. 9 on Vishinsky's list was U.N. Delegate John Foster Dulles who, sitting beside Delegate Eleanor Roosevelt, listened grimly while Vishinsky cried:

"John Foster Dulles in a speech delivered on Feb. 10, 1947 in Chicago urged 'a tough foreign policy towards the Soviet Union,' declaring that if the U.S.A. does not take up such a course, counting on the possibility of reaching a compromise with the Soviet Union, then war is inevitable. In the same speech Dulles boasted that since the collapse of the Roman Empire no nation ever possessed such great superiority of material power as the United States, and urged the United States to utilize this power to promote its ideals." While Vishinsky foamed, Dulles scribbled a reply: "I did not make the statement which Vishinsky attributed to me. I have repeatedly said that another war need not be and must not be, and I have dedicated myself to that end. . . ."

Next Vishinsky lit into the U.S. press:

"Numerous organs of the American reactionary press which is in the hands of such newspaper magnates as Morgan, Rockefeller, Ford, Hearst, McCormick [the Chicago Tribune's Colonel Bertie McCormick] and others do not lag behind the reactionary political statesmen who busy themselves with warmongering. Morgan controls the following magazines: Time, Life and Fortune, published by the well-known publishing corporation, Time Incorporated, the largest shareholder being, by the way, the Brown Brothers, Harriman and Co."*

The N.Y. Herald Tribune also received a lambasting.

Vishinsky concluded:

"The U.S.S.R. delegation on instruction of the Soviet Government declares that the U.S.S.R. considers as a matter of urgency the adoption by the United Nations organization of measures directed against the propaganda of a new war, which propaganda is being carried out at present in some countries, chiefly in the U.S.A."

As Vishinsky strode to his seat, there was frantic applause from the Soviet bloc. Said France's sad-eyed Georges Bidault next day: "The French delegation deems it futile and dangerous to conceal the magnitude and seriousness of the crisis. ... At stake we have . . . the very life of the United Nations." Said Britain's Hector McNeil: if Russia persists in trying to force its will on the world, "the unstable peace of the world will crumble and crash [with] hideous consequences."

In Moscow, the newspapers gave Vishinsky's blast the full treatment: full-page spreads for two days. Moscow's Literary Gazette shouted that U.S. foreign policy was "a program for invasion of the world." It scornfully compared President Harry Truman with Adolf Hitler: "The haberdasher from Jackson [sic] is straining for the laurels of the corporal from Munich."

If Vishinsky had meant to sow dissension in the U.N., he had chiefly succeeded in sandbagging the peace-loving nations. If he had meant to sow dissension in the U.S., he had a lot to learn about Americans. The amplifications, and the fury of his delivery were the mouthings of a bully whose number has been called. Cracked one wag: "I guess Uncle Joe has not got The Bomb."

Before he blew, Vishinsky might have done well to take some tips from a member of his delegation who has had some experience in American affairs: Sergei Kudryavtsev, whom the Royal Commission's report credits with helping to rig the spy ring which operated chiefly for the purpose of stealing atomic secrets, in Canada and the U.S.

The Comrade. Who was this angel of peace? As is the case with many Communists, Vishinsky's biography was self-consciously sketchy. But one glaring fact stood out: at 63, Andrei Vishinsky was old enough to have been an Old Bolshevik. Instead, for a longer period than he liked to remember, he had been an Old Menshevik.* It was a distinction that could matter in Soviet Russia, where public expression of the social-democratic Menshevik principles (reform instead of revolution) could get a man shot, and often did.

Vishinsky was further hampered by a strictly bourgeois background. From Austrian Emperor Francis II, a branch of the Vishinsky family in Austrian Galicia received the 18th Century title of Barons of the Holy Roman Empire. Andrei Vishinsky's branch--settling in Kiev--remained untitled. But Andrei's father became well-to-do on his fees as government-appointed notary in the booming oil city of Baku.

Father Vishinsky sent red-haired young Andrei to schools in Baku and Kiev. The boy was a capable scholar, something of a Beau Brummell, a very good dancer, self-assured to the point of arrogance. But as a law student at Kiev University after 1901, Vishinsky became absorbed with politics, joined the Mensheviks. For his part in organizing a railway strike, during the 1905 revolution (Lenin's "dress rehearsal" for 1917), he spent a year in jail. Then he went back to studying law.

Spoonfuls of Menshevism. The February (democratic) revolution of 1917 gave Vishinsky his chance; he became chief of a Moscow administrative district. But he was still in the wrong camp. He treated random visitors to his office with free soup for an ideological purpose: "In order to pour some Menshevism into them with each spoonful."

By 1920, however, it was clear to Vishinsky that Menshevism would take more than free soup. He applied for membership in the Communist Party. He was admitted. Since then his career has been extraordinary. Never once has he been found guilty of a major deviation from "the line"; mostly he has shown a surprising ability to anticipate it. He buttressed his conversion with a vehement book, Studies in the History of Communism, which avoided the more touchy doctrinal issues but trumpeted Vishinsky's Communist convictions.

But despite his zeal, Vishinsky was a comparatively small party potato, until Stalin, having liquidated his former public prosecutor, looked around for a man brash enough to take his place. He lit on Comrade Vishinsky.

The purge trials of 1936-38 gave Prosecutor Vishinsky full scope for his revolutionary ardor, his legal experience and a highly theatrical courtroom manner. Sometimes he was sarcastically solicitous. After grilling Old Bolshevik Georgy Pyatakov (former assistant Commissar of Heavy Industry) for hours, Vishinsky asked with his sharklike smile: "Accused Pyatakov, perhaps you are tired?" Sometimes he was bland, as with Old Bolshevik Karl Radek (former editor of Izvestia, former bureau chief in the Moscow Foreign Office). Vishinsky: "Were your actions conscious?" Radek: "Never in my life have I performed unconscious actions, except in my sleep." Vishinsky: "And this was, unfortunately, not in your sleep?" Radek: "This, unfortunately, was not in sleep."

"Russia Is Not America!" But sometimes Vishinsky dropped his bland manner and gave his victims a foretaste of what he gave to U.N. last week. Cried he at the end of the 1938 trials: "Let your sentence, Comrade Judges, resound as a bell calling for new victories. Crush the accursed vipers . . . foul dogs . . . disgusting villains! We cannot leave such people alive. . . . They can do such things in America--where Al Capone remains alive--but not here. . . . Thank God, Russia is not America!"

One minor matter was attended to after the purges. In the first edition of the Soviet Encyclopedia, Vishinsky had been identified as a former Menshevik. The trials accounted for most of the Encyclopedia's editors. Thereafter, a thoroughly purged edition appeared in which the only mention whatever of Andrei Vishinsky was the listing of his name among the new editors.

Since 1940, Vishinsky has been chief diplomatic assistant to Old Bolshevik Vyacheslav Molotov. His first assignment abroad--and the first time he had ever left Russia--took him to Latvia in 1940. "But that," says Vishinsky, "wasn't 'abroad' long." As a traveling deputy since then, Vishinsky has handled Kremlin matters with cold-blooded finesse in Italy and the Balkans, as well as at international conferences.

But no matter what he does, even when abroad as head of a delegation, Vishinsky is essentially the instrument--the subordinate. When Molotov is present, Vishinsky speaks only when given the signal, usually remains a deferential pace behind. The No. 2 man loads other burdens patiently upon himself. At the Foreign Ministers conference in Moscow last spring, it was Vishinsky who stayed in the center box to lead the applause for the ballerinas at each intermission and at the end, while Host Molotov and the others dashed out for drinks.

On the Parapets. Against the background of this career, the warning that Andrei Vishinsky gave to the West last week was worth pondering. It meant that Vishinsky's masters, whose people and land put Soviet Russia astride half the world, had no more intention than they had ever had of cooperating with the West, save in brief tactical moments. Did his outburst mean that the fanatics of the Kremlin were condemning not only the peaceful part of the world, but the patient Russian people, exhausted by years of dictatorship and permanent economic depression, to World War III? Only the Kremlin knew. Certainly, more conflict lay immediately ahead at U.N. This week, the Assembly's steering committee voted (over strenuous Russian objection) to add George Marshall's new proposals to the working agenda. Without objection from the U.S., the committee agreed that Vishinsky's resolution on "warmongers" should be debated, too. But inevitable conflict did not mean inevitable war. It did apparently mean that the present generation was facing perennial duty on the parapets.

* Last week, as the five treaties finally went into effect, and U.S. troops were getting ready to pull out of Italy, Palmiro Togliatti's Communists were talking revolution; Tito's Yugoslav troops were bulging into Trieste and menacingly taking stations along the new Yugoslav-Italian frontier. In Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria, Communist-backed minorities had matters firmly under control. Finland was tied to the Russian economic and security bloc. France was infiltrated with Communist power. China was gripped by civil war. Persia and Turkey lived precariously in the shadow of the Communist ax. Greece was directly threatened.

* The late J. P. Morgan died in 1943. TIME Inc. is controlled by the stockholdings of its officers and employees; the two largest shareholders are Editor in Chief Luce and President Larsen.

* In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Party split into the Bolsheviks (majority) led by Lenin and the Mensheviks (minority). Often the Bolsheviks were the minority and the Mensheviks were the majority, but Russia is Russia, and Communists will be Communists.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.