740.00116 European War 1939/643: Telegram
The First Secretary of Embassy in the Soviet Union (Dickerson) to the Secretary of State
[Received 10:27 p.m.]
982. Pravda and Izvestiya of November 4 publish a ukase [of] the Presidium [of] the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics forming an extraordinary state commission for ascertaining and investigating, with a view to obtaining ultimate and suitable compensation therefor, the offenses of the German Fascist aggressors and their accomplices, and all the losses in civilian life and property inflicted by them upon citizens’ collective farms, public organizations, state enterprises and institutions of the Soviet Union. The losses referred to will also include expense and dislocation occasioned by the removal of industrial enterprises, farm and other property, and sections of the population.
This commission which will coordinate and expand work already being done in this field, includes in its membership: Shvernik,51 head of the Soviet labor unions, as chairman; Zhdanov,52 Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; Nikolai, Metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia; A. Tolstoi53 the writer; several prominent academicians; and a famous aviatrix.
The two papers mentioned and also Krasnaya Zvszda at the same time publish editorials concerning the new commission but these appear to contain nothing of special interest. They refer, however, to the note transmitted in translation as the Embassy’s 905 October 19, 10 a.m.,54 as well as to the three circular atrocity notes addressed by Molotov to the chiefs of diplomatic missions during the past year, as reported telegraphically in each case at the time.
- Nikolay Mikhailovich Shvernik, president of the All-Union Central Council of Labor Unions.↩
- Andrey Alexandrovich Zhdanov.↩
- Alexey Tolstoy.↩
- Not printed; but see telegram No. 896, October 16, from the Chargé in the Soviet Union, vol. i, p. 60.↩