In September 1934 the U. S. S. R., long considered an outcast by other powers, was voted into membership of the League of Nations, and its delegate and Foreign Commissar, Maxim Litvinoff, was duly seated. At that time, and later, the Geneva platform was used as an international sounding board for Comrade Litvinoff's clean-cut, often stirring theses—against aggression, for the rights of small nations, on the immorality of war.
Foreign Commissar Litvinoff's most eloquent, emphatic statement on international morals was made in his maiden speech: We are faced now with the task of preventing war. ... At the same time we must grasp the undoubted truth that . . . not a single more or less important war can be localized. . . . We must also tell ourselves that any war sooner or later will bring distress to all countries, both to the combatants and the nonparticipants.
Comrade Litvinoff's sole known duty today is to attend Supreme Soviet sessions, where he usually hears his heavy-tongued successor, Viacheslav Molotov. take a different tack. Meanwhile, Joseph Stalin's "Government of toilers," certainly "without declaring war" and surely "without a shadow of cause of justification," has, indeed, made war against Finland. And as last week the League met to do something about it, another Soviet delegate, Jacob Z. Suritz, also Ambassador to France, delivered no such ringing anti-aggression exhortations as used to be expected from Maxim Litvinoff.
Comrade Suritz is a seasoned Soviet diplomat. He once headed a Soviet mission to Afghanistan, where he greased Afghan palms so well that that mountainous kingdom came to lean toward the Soviet Union more than toward Great Britain. Later he laid the foundation for a long Turkish-Russian friendship, and still later, Jew though he is, he became the Soviet Ambassador to the Jew-baiting Nazis. Adolf Hitler treated him with all honor, however, and modified the famed anti-Semitic Nürnberg laws so that the Ambassador could keep Aryan scrub women and maids under 45 years old in his Embassy.
"Ultimatum." But Delegate Suritz is withal no great orator, and when the ghost of collective security walked the cold halls of the vast Palace of Peace at Geneva last week, he stayed at his hotel. Finnish Delegate Rudolf Holsti called upon the League to give Finland "all practical support possible," shouted: "Give us back peace!" Argentine Delegate Rodolfo Freyre, glowing with anti-Soviet hatred, was the spokesman for those who demanded that the Soviet Union be read out of the League. Swedish Delegate Bo Osten Unden moved that a telegram—virtually an ultimatum—be sent to Moscow asking that the Red Army be halted and that the Finnish-Russian dispute be mediated. Britain's Richard Austen Butler asked and got a time limit of 24 hours for the Soviet Union to reply.