500.CC/9–2844
Memorandum of Conversation, by Mr. Leo Pasvolsky, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State 52
Mr. Sobolev53 lunched with me and we had a long talk about Dumbarton Oaks. He expressed great satisfaction with the course of the conversations and with the results achieved. He reiterated a remark which he made to me several days ago to the effect that our document is far better than they had hoped would be possible. He said that they had found it easier to work with us than with the British because British thinking seemed to be much more rigid in terms of the League experience than was their thinking or ours. He thought, however, that on the whole the British behaved very well with the result that what we are now projecting is a very great improvement over the League.
He said that he and the other members of the Soviet Delegation were very much impressed by the thoroughness of our preparation and asked me if I would tell him something of the way we went about [Page 847] the matter. I gave him a rather detailed description of our work over the past two years.54 He was intensely interested and remarked that if anybody in Moscow had attempted to start work of this kind in 1942 he would have been the laughing stock of the place. He asked me if there would be any objection to his reporting in Moscow rather fully on what I had told him about our method of work. I said that I should be delighted to have him do so.
We came then to what appeared to be the three questions that are still open, namely: voting in the Council; initial membership, including the questions of the Soviet Republics; and trusteeship. He said that the voting problem is a real issue which will have to be settled at the highest political level, possibly by the chiefs of state. The question of initial membership he thought was one of a diplomatic character. The trusteeship problem should not prove to be too difficult.
In connection with voting, I asked him what he himself thought of the tentative proposal which emerged out of our four-hour meeting devoted to that subject. He would not commit himself as to his own ideas, merely saying that his colleagues here did not like it too well. I did not feel that I should press him, but he left me with the impression that the proposal was very sketchily submitted to Moscow, if at all.
As regards initial membership, he also shied away from any discussion of the Soviet Republics, in rather marked contrast to the emphasis which he put on the importance of the voting problem.
As regards trusteeship, he said that it was a pity that we did not discuss the question in the course of our conversations. He said that the Soviet Government is interested in the problem, even though the Soviet Government has very little to contribute to a discussion since the Soviet Union has no colonies and no experience in colonial administration. He said that the document on dependent areas which the Secretary placed before the Moscow Conference55 was very favorably received by the Soviet Government but, as he understood, had not been liked by the British. In connection with that, he asked me what was the origin of the idea of regional commissions and expressed considerable surprise when I told him that the British themselves had suggested the idea.56
[Page 848]He went on to say that there isn’t any doubt that the international organization will be an incomplete structure unless some machinery is provided for trusteeship purposes and inquired as to what our plans were for handling the matter; that is to say, whether it is our thought that the whole subject should be held in abeyance until the big conference or whether some preliminary steps might be taken before the conference. I replied that we have not as yet given thought to that. The question could obviously be left open until the conference convenes, or alternatively, we could have an exchange of papers and even some exchanges of views before the conference. He said that, in his opinion, his government would prefer to have an exchange of views before the big conference and would be particularly glad to receive our documents because, he repeated, they themselves have done very little in this field and are waiting for a further lead from us.
He asked me what our plans were for the conference as regards timing. I replied that, because of the projected publication of our document, a relatively short time could elapse between the issuing of invitations to the conference and the conference itself. He said that he wondered whether or not this was too optimistic, because, in his opinion, we ought to go to a conference with the charter of the organization fully drafted and rather thoroughly discussed among ourselves. I told him that in our thinking the drafting of the charter should not present great difficulties; that obviously we and they and the British would in the meantime be working on a possible formulation; and that, if necessary, it would be possible to have a preliminary drafting group meet for a couple of weeks before the conference in the same way that we are projecting a similar meeting for the drafting of the Court statute.
Mr. Sobolev then gave me his personal ideas on the location of the headquarters of the new organization. He felt that the seat should be in Europe and that it should not be in any of the large countries. This narrows the choice down to very few places. Prague might be a good possibility. I said that I personally agreed with his first two propositions, but that my preference would be Geneva. I then repeated a suggestion which I tried out on him about a month ago about internationalizing a portion of Geneva around the present [Page 849] League and ILO buildings. He said that they are thinking about that suggestion.
- Copy obtained from the Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, papers of Mr. Leo Pasvolsky, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State.↩
- A. A. Sobolev, Minister Counsellor of the Soviet Embassy in the United Kingdom; Deputy Chairman of the Soviet Delegation to the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations.↩
- See bracketed note, Foreign Relations, 1943, vol. i, pp. 1050–1053.↩
- Conference document No. 44, ibid., p. 747.↩
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The first regional commission to be set up as an intergovernmental body on social and economic matters for the member governments and their non-self-governing territories was the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission whose creation was announced by a joint communiqué issued on March 9, 1942, following an exchange of notes between the British and the United States Governments (Department of State Bulletin, March 14, 1942, p. 229). This Commission, according to Secretary Hull (Memoirs, vol. ii, p. 1236), was conceived by President Roosevelt’s representative, Charles W. Taussig.
The British proposal on the establishment of regional commissions (not printed) was submitted to Secretary Hull on February 4, 1943 (see bracketed note, Foreign Relations, 1943, vol. i, pp. 1050, 1051). A proposed declaration, “The Atlantic Charter and National Independence” (not printed), submitted to President Roosevelt on November 17, 1942, was the basis of the draft “Declaration by the United Nations on National Independence”, submitted to President Roosevelt on March 17, 1943. The latter draft included the suggestion that regional commissions be set up to accomplish the five ends outlined therein; for text of this draft, see ibid., p. 747.
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