RUSSIA'S LATEST LOOK AT F.D.R.

FROM Moscow last week came an outpouring of praise for a former President of the U.S.: on the 80th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt's birth, both Pravda and Izvestia ran memorial articles hailing F.D.R. as the champion of Soviet-American understanding and cooperation. Khrushchev dispatched a warm message to Roosevelt's widow, praising F.D.R. for "his efforts on behalf of Soviet-American friendship." A Russian delegation appeared at Hyde Park to lay a wreath on F.D.R.'s grave, and Nina Khrushchev joined U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson and 250 Russians at a Moscow memorial ceremony dominated by a portrait of the late President.

"Capitalist Captain." Of all the U.S. Presidents who have held office since the Bolsheviks took over Russia, Roosevelt came closest to the Soviet idea of what a U.S. President should be. He won Russian gratitude for establishing diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union immediately after he took office in 1933 (Democrat Wilson had "intervened" against the new Bolshevik regime; Republicans Harding, Coolidge and Hoover had refused to recognize it). Stalin in the '30s gave F.D.R. ambiguous praise as "one of the strongest figures among all the captains of the contemporary capitalist world." But the Soviet press was generally scornful of the New Deal, occasionally deriding Roosevelt as "a bourgeois politician," and Roosevelt hit bottom in Soviet esteem when he condemned the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939 and placed a "moral embargo" on U.S. sale of planes and other war materials to the U.S.S.R.

After Germany attacked Russia in June of 1941, and Roosevelt offered the beleaguered Russians "every possible material assistance," his standing with the Soviets quickly rose. As the wartime ally of Stalin in the fight against fascism, Roosevelt was held up to the Russian people as one of a handful of Westerners who was a true friend of the Soviet Union. At the Teheran and Yalta conferences, Roosevelt turned on the charm to win Stalin's trust and cooperation ("I think I can handle Stalin personally better than my State Department"). As a result of agreements made at those meetings, in return for Russian promises that were later cynically broken, the way was cleared for the Soviet Union to take over Eastern Europe. In 1945, three weeks before the Germans surrendered, President Roosevelt died, and Russians wept openly in the streets. The Communists are highly sensitive about the evidence that Roosevelt became disenchanted with Stalin and Soviet policy shortly before his death.

"Sage Observations." Since Roosevelt's death, the Russians have often held up his policies as an object lesson to other U.S. Presidents on how to deal with the Soviet Union. And so it was last week. Said Pravda, making the point bluntly: "It would be wise for present-day Western statesmen who assert that coexistence is a trap set by Communists to remember [President Roosevelt's] sage observations."

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