Russia and United Nations

Report Outline
Moscow's Challenge to United Nations
Soviet Union and World Organization
Soviet Proposals for U.N. Reorganization

Moscow's Challenge to United Nations

Soviet Attacks on United National; U.S. Response

Whether the United Nations can fulfill its high responsibilities under a constant drumfire of attack from one of its most powerful members is now disturbing non-Communist members of the world organization. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko's renewed assault before the General Assembly, March 21, made it plain that the sweeping offensive launched from the same rostrum last autumn by Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev was not a flash in the pan. Moscow appears determined to press with all vigor its demands for a reshaping of the United Nations—a reshaping that would make the organization subservient to Soviet will. Upon the firmness of Western resistance, therefore, may depend the survival of the United Nations as an impartial and effective force in affairs of the international community.

A day before Gromyko addressed the General Assembly, Secretary of State Dean Rusk said that “Recent attacks upon the Secretary General and proposals to substitute a triumvirate for a single executive agent must be looked upon as an attempt to reduce the United Nations to ineffectiveness.”

The United States [Rusk affirmed] cannot accept so serious an undermining of the agreements and purposes of the Charter. We have committed ourselves to the United Nations as an indispensable instrument of peace. But if it is important to us, so it is to the generality of its membership, who must look to it for their safety and for attention to their interests in a turbulent world.