Description
The U.S.S.R. and World Peace is a combination of speeches given in 1948–49 by then-Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky on some of the most vital international problems of mankind at that time, selected by Jessica Smith, the editor of Soviet Russia Today. The significant challenges facing the world were not only relevant then, but continue to shape our contemporary epoch. In these excerpts, the reader is able to understand and evaluate the Soviet view on such problems of control of atomic weapons, the status of Berlin as well as Germany as a whole, the stand of the Great Powers towards the Greek Civil War, and issues of international law such as the United Nations veto and principles of human rights. In these matters, one sees the lasting Soviet impact on the nature of the post-war international order.
In constant sequence, this edition reveals how the Soviet delegation at the United Nations, then in the minority, was at odds with the other four permanent members: America, Great Britain, France and the Republic of China. In Vyshinsky’s view, these powers aimed to maintain the American atomic monopoly and increase the armaments race despite Soviet proposals for de-escalation, continue foreign intervention in Greece despite Soviet proposals for withdrawal, rule by majority on international bodies despite Soviet proposals to ensure the Potsdam principle of unanimity, give abstract and unguaranteed rights to individuals despite Soviet proposals to give those rights teeth, and to split up both Berlin and Germany under Anglo-Franco-American diktat despite Soviet proposals for a united Germany under a democratic government.
Although subjective, Vyshinsky’s arguments are also well-reasoned, and in The U.S.S.R. and World Peace, the reader gains an insight into Soviet emphasis, insistances and claims, as well as omissions, regarding the creation of a new global order in their own words.