811.20 (D) Regulations/3589
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Acting Secretary of State
The Soviet Ambassador called to see me this morning at his request. The Ambassador expressed great satisfaction with the way in which [Page 724] his conversation with Mr. Acheson had proceeded the day before and said that his experts were now working hard in order to prepare additional statistics and material before further conversations took place.
The Ambassador seemed to be in a decidedly conciliatory frame of mind. He stated, however, that his Government was placed in an ever-increasingly embarrassing situation because of its inability to get any assurances here as to what the Soviet Government would be able to obtain in the coming months in the way of machine tools, other equipment and raw materials. He said that it was impossible for the Soviet Government to work out any orderly program for internal industrial development during the coming year or the years thereafter unless it knew that it had an assured source of supply for such material.
I replied that I appreciated these difficulties as I was sure the Ambassador appreciated the situation in which the Government of the United States found itself. I said it was manifestly impossible for us, in the month of March 1941, to make a firm commitment that a factory could receive orders from the Soviet Government for industrial equipment, which would keep that factory busy over a period of months, when in all probability our own defense requirements might make it necessary for the labor and machinery in that factory to be devoted during that same period to the turning out of defense matériel. I said I had made it perfectly clear to the Ambassador on repeated occasions that this Government desired to maintain and to increase normal trade relations with the Soviet Union, but I said I thought the time had now come for me to speak in perfectly blunt terms to the Ambassador with regard to one feature of this problem to which I could not attribute too much emphasis.
I said that the policy which I had just indicated held as the policy of this Government. On the other hand, I said, the Soviet Government should be under no misapprehension that while this Government desired to improve normal trade relations with the Soviet Union, it would not agree to facilitate the purchase by the Soviet Union in the United States of any material of any kind whatsoever which would inure, directly or indirectly, to the benefit of the war activities of Germany. The Soviet Union had announced to this Government as its policy its desire to trade with the belligerents on both sides. I said that the policy of this Government was that which had been made clear in numerous official declarations made by the President and that which was set forth in entire clarity in the so-called Lend-Lease Bill just enacted by the Congress.26 The Ambassador would readily understand, I said, that at a time when this country was [Page 725] bending every energy and spending vast sums in order to assist Great Britain in defeating Germany, it would not only be illogical but absurd for this Government to facilitate the exportation by the United States of material which could result to Germany’s benefit in carrying on its military objectives.
For once the Ambassador refrained from bringing up the question of discrimination and made no effort to argue. He accepted without question the statement I had made to him. He reminded me of the assurances which his Government had recently made public to the effect that nothing imported from the United States would be transshipped to Germany. I said that, of course, this assurance had been gratifying to this country for the reasons he had mentioned, but I said that naturally the assurances did not cover the question of replacement nor of indirect assistance. The Ambassador again referred to the statistics issued by the Department of Commerce recently, maintaining that these official statistics of the Department of Commerce showed that Russia was importing no more than the normal amounts previously imported from the United States and in many instances subnormal quantities. I stated that this, of course, was again an encouraging indication but that it was by no means all-inclusive nor conclusive and that I would have to make it clear to the Ambassador that while any requests he might make to this Department for the purchase by the Soviet Government of material in this country would be given friendly and considerate treatment, his Government and he should be under no illusions that anything would be done in the way of supplying them with products which could in any way whatever be of eventual assistance to Germany.27
- Approved March 11, 1941; 55 Stat. 31.↩
- Further conversation with Ambassador Umansky on developments in the Par East and of his unconcern over possible German designs or aggression against the Soviet Union was noted in another memorandum of March 22, 1941, by Mr. Welles; for text, see vol. iv, p. 112.↩