The Soviet Origins of the United Nations

While mainstream history under-explores the contribution of the USSR to the origins of the United Nations, a closer examination of the negotiations to establish the world body from the Soviet perspective reveals a somewhat different picture, writes GEOFFREY ROBERTS.
Far from being unimportant to Moscow, the creation of a successor to the League of Nations was a central preoccupation of Soviet postwar peace planners. As Josef Stalin told Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yalta, the author recalls, the Big Three had to create an international security organization that would keep the peace for 50 years.
“The centrality of the Soviet role in the foundation of the UN was the result of long-term engagement with the idea of an international organization of states dedicated to the maintenance of peace and security,” ROBERTS writes in the Journal of Contemporary History.
While Soviets never embraced the liberal concept of world government – they had their own utopian idea of a world federation based on workers’ power and class solidarity – they took seriously the practical utility of the League of Nations long before they became a member of the organization, he writes in an article titled ‘A League of Their Own: The Soviet Origins of the United Nations’.
Crucial was the post-revolutionary shift in Soviet foreign policy to seeking peaceful coexistence with the capitalist world, initially as a temporary tactic of survival and then as a long-term strategy for the spread of socialism, states ROBERTS, a professor at the University of Helsinki. “In that context, Moscow saw the League as a means to promote the cause of disarmament and then, in the 1930s, as a framework for the pursuit of collective security.”
The abysmal failure of the League and of the Soviets’ own policy of collective security induced Stalin to pursue more conventional great power politics in the form of a spheres influence deal with Hitler, the author states. After the failure of the Nazi–Soviet pact, the Soviets returned to the idea of collective security in the form of proposals for an international organization that would institutionalize a concert of great powers imposing peace and security across the globe.
The security architecture of the newly created UN reflected that Soviet vision, he writes, but it lacked the necessary political basis. The grand alliance broke up after the war and the UN became a battleground of the Cold War. “Paradoxically, what kept the Soviet Union from leaving the organization was the veto system, which was devised to foster great power unity, but in practice became a mechanism used by all the permanent members to protect their vital interests from UN encroachments. This was a far cry from Soviet hopes and optimism in 1945.”