811.20 (D) Regulations/2433
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Secretary of State
The Soviet Ambassador came in at his request. He spent twenty minutes rehearsing the differences between our two Governments, which he and Mr. Welles have discussed from time to time—the Ambassador said twenty-two times since last summer. I need not repeat here the list of topics that he and Mr. Welles have had under discussion during the past ten months or something near that period.
He handed me a communication, signed by himself, a copy of which is hereto attached.51 It relates, according to his statement, to the detention of the cargo on board the S.S. Norseland intended for [Page 746] shipment to the U.S.S.R. He cited numerous figures about the decline of trade between our two countries and a number of items about shipping and the detention of certain commodities, including machinery which his Government had contracted for, and which orders were subsequently cancelled, et cetera, et cetera. I need not repeat each of these rather well-known items. He repeated the charge two or three times that the action of this Government was due to hostility to his Government, or, in other words, that it was a personal act due to personal hostility.
I halted him at this stage and said that when I think of a country I think of the people more than the Government, and that neither I nor my Government has the least hostility towards the peoples of any country; that in the case of the Soviet Union and its Government I have not the slightest feeling of personal hostility, nor has my Government. I stated that my Government occupies a very definite position towards the world-wide movement of the forces of conquest and destruction led by Hitler; that this Government proposes to exert itself to the utmost to see that Hitler does not get control of the high seas, which would include Great Britain; and that that is the one supreme purpose we have in mind and that amidst all of our preparations for defense and resistance, it, of course, is not possible to deal normally with so-called neutral countries in a commercial way. I continued by saying that it is not only entirely inaccurate but grossly unfair to impute personal considerations to the slightest extent to actions of this Government, and I did not propose that the Ambassador should get away from the office with any thought that he had successfully fastened that charge on this Government, since it was absolutely without basis. I said that this Government occupies a certain relation to the Hitler movement of destruction and conquest whereas the Soviet Government in numerous respects seems to occupy a very different attitude from that of this Government, but that that is his Government’s entire privilege. I added that this situation cannot for a moment deter my Government from taking all of the steps it deems necessary and important for its self-defense. For example, we have frozen the assets of many European countries; we have suffered great losses of our regular exports to Great Britain in the way of apples, tobacco, cotton and other agricultural products, due to Great Britain’s war measures, and while we felt this to be a painful experience, we never thought of treating such a thing as personal no more than the many countries in Europe whose assets we have frozen thought of making it a personal matter. I emphasized the point that the Soviet Government has suffered less and complained more about the unavoidable difficulties incident to dealing with the Hitler military situation than any other two or three countries whose assets we have [Page 747] frozen or whose commerce we have interrupted under the compelling war conditions.
I said it was greatly surprising to see his Government take such a narrow view when my Government, for example, has recognized that Soviet Russia has more or less commercial relations with some of the belligerent countries, but that this fact is seemingly not recognized by the Soviet Government in connection with any necessary steps by my Government to prevent military supplies from filtering through Soviet Russia to Germany. The Ambassador undertook to assert the complete privilege of a neutral so far as his country was concerned. I replied that during the World War the best friends this country had anywhere were the Scandinavian countries; that they assured us at the outset that we could sell to them in any quantities they needed and that they would be sure to let no amount above normal exports get across to Germany whereas we later discovered that vast and abnormal quantities were filtering into Germany all along the border with the result that we cut down and embargoed all exports to those countries above the pre-war level. But I added that they were the last people to think for a moment about taking offense—much less treating it as personal—in the manner in which the Soviet Government is treating a trivial amount of commercial difficulties between our two countries as personal. The Ambassador did not undertake to argue these points. I reminded him again about how we had been friends of their people both before and after the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in 1933.
The discussion was a little animated, but so far as I observed it was free from acrimony or personal feeling.
- Infra. A protest against the detention of the Swedish steamship Colombia in San Francisco on May 7, 1941, is not printed.↩