Editorial Note
A statement by the official Soviet news agency Tass, published in the Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestia on May 20, reviewed the proposals on Greece made by Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Gromyko in his recent conversations with Assistant Secretary of State Rusk and British Minister of State McNeil. For the text of the Tass statement, see Vneshnyaya politika Sovetskogo Soyuza, 1949 god (Moscow: Gosizpolit, 1953), pages 99–100. For an English translation of the statement, see Current Digest of the Soviet Press. June 21, 1949, Volume I, No. 21, pages 37–38.
In response to the Tass statement, the Department of State on May 20 issued a statement to the press presenting a substantial summary record of the Rusk–McNeil–Gromyko informal conversations of April 26, May 4, and May 14 together with an analysis of the conversations. The British Government also issued a somewhat briefer statement to the press on May 20 on the substance and meaning of the Rusk–McNeil–Gromyko conversations. Both the American and the British [Page 330] statements emphasized that the basic issue in the Greek question was the violation of Greece’s northern border. The statements also reaffirmed the view that the United Nations was the proper forum for the discussion of the Greek problem and that negotiations on the problem could not be entered into without the participation of the Greek Government. For the text of the Department of State statement, issued as Department of State Press Release No. 378, see Department of State Bulletin, May 29, 1949, pages 696–697; or A Decade of American Foreign Policy: Basic Documents, 1941–49, prepared at the request of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations by the Staff of the Committee and the Department of State, 81st Congress, 1st Session, Document No. 123 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1950), pages 769–771; or Raymond Dennett and Robert K. Turner, editors, Documents on American Foreign Relations, Volume XI, January 1–December 31, 1949 (Princeton University Press for the World Peace Foundation, 1950), pages 660–662. For the British statement, see the New York Times, May 21, 1949, page 2.