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  4. Document 340

Editorial Note

The contents of an interview of Soviet Premier I. V. Stalin by the official Soviet news organ, Pravda, became known in Western countries on February 17. According to a text printed in the New York Times on that date (the interview itself occurred on February 17), Stalin made the following comments about the United Nations, in partial response to the lead-off question of the interview: “How do you estimate the decision of the United Nations Organization which proclaimed the Chinese People’s Republic an aggressor?” (a reference to the Resolution of February 1, 1951 of the General Assembly of the United Nations; documentation on this matter is in volume VII).

“The United Nations Organization, created as the bulwark for preserving peace, is being turned into an instrument of war, into a means for unleashing a new world war. … The United Nations Organization is at the same time ceasing to be a world organization of nations enjoying equal rights. … The United Nations Organization is now not so much a world organization as an organization for the Americans, an organization acting on behalf of the requirements of the American aggressors. … The United Nations Organization is therefore taking the inglorious road of the League of Nations. In this way it is burying its moral prestige and dooming itself to disintegration.” (New York Times, February 17, 1951, page 3)

Stalin identified the “aggressive core” of the United Nations to be the ten North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries and the twenty Latin American countries.

For immediate official United States comment on the Stalin interview, see Department of State Bulletin, March 5, 1951, pages 367 and 368. It was pointed out that the Voice of America and the Wireless Bulletin of the Department of State were emphasizing “the fact [Page 457] that, whereas the Soviet state has heretofore used its puppet rulers and stooges to propagandize the world with the fake charges and claims of the Kremlin, the Chief of the Soviet Union, himself, has now put himself on record and on trial before the world by lending his own name to the Soviet deception on an international scale.”