860h.01/9–2444: Telegram
The Ambassador in the Soviet Union (Harriman) to the Secretary of State
[Received September 24—6:30 p.m.]
3653. ReDepts 2215, September 26 [16], 2 p.m., I have received a letter from Vyshinski dated September 22 stating he has informed the All-Slav Committee52 that the United States Government does not feel itself in a position to grant visitors’ visas to the non-Soviet members of the Moscow delegation to the American Slav Congress in Pittsburgh and that the participation of the Soviet members in the work of the Congress would bring them within the provisions of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
In reply Vyshinski says the All-Slav Committee has informed him that the refusal to issue visas to the delegates of Poland and Yugoslavia, the refusal to grant diplomatic visas to the (Soviet) delegates—generals and heroes of the Soviet Union, the delay in the issuance of visas to the (Soviet) delegates which made it impossible for them to arrive in time for the meeting, and above all the more than strange conditions of police registration in which prominent citizens of the Soviet Union might find themselves on arrival in the United States, make it necessary for the All-Slav Committee to refrain from sending a delegation to the meeting of American citizens of Slavic origin.
- The All-Slav Committee of the Soviet Union had been formed about August 1941, and Lt. Gen. Alexander Semenovich Gundorov was Chairman of the Presidium. He was the chief organizer for the Pan-Slav movement and its activities during the war.↩