Bill Collector at Work

Bearing a handsomely engraved Burmese silver bowl for Nikita Khrushchev, U.N. Secretary-General U Thant flew into Moscow last week on a matter of principal: $54,768,188 in back payments that Russia owes the world organization.

In the era of the billion-dollar budget, the amount was trivial enough. But behind it lurked the threat of an ugly showdown at the U.N. next fall. Most of the debt is on assessments voted by the General Assembly to pay for U.N. peace-keeping forces in the Congo and the Gaza Strip. Russia claims the assessments were illegal, has refused to pay for two years. But the U.N. Charter says that any nation whose payments are more than two years in arrears may lose its right to vote, and the U.S. is determined to see that the charter is en forced. The Kremlin's answer: any such attempt will wreck the United Nations.

Was this just a bluff? U Thant spent two days urging Nikita to make at least a token payment, but emerged emptyhanded. "I did not get the impression that the Soviet Union is prepared to change its policy in this matter," he told a press conference in Moscow. The mild-mannered little Burmese--often criticized for excessive flexibility--could have left it at that. But to everyone's astonishment, the Secretary-General took his case straight to the Russian people.

This is not normally an easy matter. But making what was supposedly a protocol appearance on Russia's television network, U Thant told an estimated 40 million viewers that the U.N. is "facing a very serious financial crisis." What's more, he added, "I am convinced that the people of the Soviet Union and their leaders want the United Nations to develop into a really effective instrument for the maintenance of peace. To achieve this noble objective, it is up to all of us to try to find a solution to get the United Nations out of the crisis facing it today."

Whether 40 million Russians could sway their leaders was a dubious question. But at least it was a question worth asking. After all, nobody like the U.N.'s Thant had ever before put them to the test.

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