Diplomats in Waiting

In May of last year a brainy, bespectacled ousted leader of Britain's Labor Party became a missionary. Just back from a round-the-world trip with long stopovers in Russia and Free China, Sir Richard Stafford Cripps was convinced that despite the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Russia might yet be Britain's ally in World War II. His mission: to go to Moscow and help bring this about.

This week Missionary Sir Stafford saw his mission accomplished. In Moscow, after two audiences with Joseph Stalin, he sat down with Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, drafted and signed a 117-word compact between Britain and Russia.

No treaty of friendship, the Pact stated tersely that the two countries would support each other "in the present war against Hitlerite Germany," that neither would make a separate peace.

A thorough realist, Sir Stafford would be the last man in the world to pat himself on the back. For months his job has been to sit outside the Kremlin walls, waiting for a break between Germany and Russia, based on their mutual fear. The actual negotiation was done by Hitler's invading armies.

To another diplomat in waiting, a Russian, the Pact was equally good news. He was onetime Foreign Commissar Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff, once No. 1 sales man of Russia's United Front. For a decade he held forth at Geneva, talking for collective security and against Fascism, was waved to the sidelines in 1939 when Russia changed her tactics, began her appeasement play for time.

Last week, in an English-language broadcast from Moscow, Litvinoff too ended his silent wait. Once again he was saying that it was the job of Russia, Britain (and this time he added the U.S.) to stop Hitler, to destroy "the greatest obstacle to the development of civilization that has ever existed."

Broadcasting from London, Winston Churchill promised that Britain would do her part by increased bombings of Ger many and "that unhappy, abject, subject province of Germany which used to be called Italy."

And in the House of Commons, following a display of fancy semantics by certain government officials who publicized Britain and Russia not as allies but as "co-belligerents," Churchill stated flatly, "the agreement is, of course, an alliance and the Russian people are now our allies."

To the British press and public, impatient with word-juggling and extravagantly hopeful of the results that might follow Russia's entry into the war, these were cheering words.

But notwithstanding the Churchill statement, there were signs that not all quarters of British officialdom found it easy to warm up to the Bolsheviks. BBC omitted The Internationale from its weekly program of anthems of Britain's allies, was swamped by protests from, public, press and Parliament. To a reporter, a BBC official said with historic detachment: "We shall certainly play one of the Russian anthems. The question is: what is the Russian anthem?" BBC compromised by playing a recording of a Red Air Force song, Plane, My Plane! Labor's Chief Whip Lord Strabolgi slyly reminded the House of Lords that The Internationale was a stand-by of Labor Party meetings, that he had seen Minister of Home Security Herbert Morrison singing "with great gusto and evident enjoyment":

'Tis the final conflict, let each stand in his place,

The International Soviet shall be the human race!

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