Soviet Union and the United Nations

• 1. Introduction

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  The Soviet Union helped design the United Nations before Stalin had agreed to join it. Soviet delegates worked at the founding conferences of 1944, drafting the institution's architecture, even as Stalin himself held back. Franklin D. Roosevelt worked directly to persuade him.

  The Soviet Union that emerged from those negotiations occupied an unusual position. How did a single country come to hold more than one seat? What did its aggressive use of the Security Council veto actually produce? And when the Soviet state dissolved, what happened to its permanent place at the table?

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• 2. Bargaining at the Founding

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  At the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in 1944, the Soviet Union arrived with a sweeping demand. It wanted the Security Council veto to cover even procedural matters, so that any member state could block a topic from reaching the floor at all. The United States and Britain pushed back.

  The dispute over the veto was not the only fight. Moscow initially protested the admission of the Philippines and British India, arguing their independence was then largely theoretical. Then came a more striking demand. The Soviet Union wanted all fifteen of its constituent republics admitted as individual United Nations members. Washington countered that if that standard applied, all forty-eight US states should qualify too.

  At the Yalta Conference, the two sides reached a compromise. The Soviet Union agreed to drop its claim to a veto on procedural matters. In exchange, two Soviet republics, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR, were admitted as full United Nations members alongside the USSR itself. The Journal of Cold War Studies has argued this trade-off was explicit. The Soviets gave up the broader veto in exchange for the two extra seats.

  British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden backed this arrangement for his own reasons. Eden wanted British India to hold its own seat at the United Nations, as it had in the League of Nations. Roosevelt agreed at Eden's insistence, despite the objection of the US State Department. That objection was overruled, leaving in place an arrangement that gave Moscow three votes wherever two would normally go.

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• 3. The Veto as Cornerstone

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  Andrei Y. Vishinsky, the Soviet Union's representative to the United Nations in 1950, made the Soviet position plain. "The veto power is the paramount principle," he declared, "which constitutes the cornerstone of the United Nations." The Soviets had pressed for that power in both the Security Council and the General Assembly. They treated it as the minimum condition for any meaningful Soviet role in the organization.

  By 1973, the Soviet Union had cast 109 vetoes. That total came from 128 vetoes exercised across the Security Council's entire history to that point. The veto was not always final. In 75 percent of the cases where Moscow blocked a measure, the United Nations found ways to take further action regardless. As 1950 was about to demonstrate, the power also carried one fundamental requirement: someone had to be in the room to use it.

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• 4. The China Walkout

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  The debate over China's representation at the United Nations opened in 1949. The Chinese Communist Party had completed its victory in the Chinese Civil War on the mainland. The Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan, an island Japan had surrendered in 1945. Both governments claimed the legitimate right to China's United Nations seat. The Security Council, siding with the United States, ruled the People's Republic of China's delegation illegitimate.

  The Soviet Union consistently voted to seat the Communist government and pushed for its recognition throughout the dispute. China's seat remained under Nationalist control until 1971, when it was transferred to the Communist government of the People's Republic of China.

  In January 1950, Yakov Malik, the Soviet representative, left the Security Council chamber. He announced that Moscow would boycott all further Council meetings until China's representation was resolved. What followed was not what anyone in Moscow had anticipated. With no Soviet delegate present, there was no veto to cast. The Security Council voted to send United Nations military forces into Korea, authorizing what became the Korean War. The Soviets returned to various United Nations bodies by August 1950, but the authorization their absence had permitted was already in effect.

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• 5. The Shifting Balance

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  The decolonization wave of the 1960s reshaped the United Nations' membership. Former colonies that won independence were accepted into the organization, and many proved receptive to Soviet appeals against imperialism. By the 1970s, General Assembly votes had grown increasingly hostile toward the United States.

  The Soviet Union and Third World states found common rhetorical ground on the cause of global inequality. Both argued that imperialism had created and sustained the gap in wealth between nations. Where they disagreed was on how much Soviet assistance should actually flow to poorer countries. That gap between argument and action produced persistent tension.

  In 1987, Western media reported a striking contradiction. Eastern European and Asian communist countries had received more United Nations development assistance than the Soviet Union itself had contributed. These were Soviet allies and satellite states. Moscow had publicly championed the UN's proposed New International Economic Order. That plan called for transferring wealth from richer northern nations to poorer southern ones. In September 1987, the Soviet Union announced it would repay a portion of its debt to the United Nations.

  Afghanistan complicated the Soviet position further. The Soviet invasion of that country drew fierce opposition at the United Nations, as did Soviet support for the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. A 1987 Soviet proposal for a "Comprehensive System of International Peace and Security" attracted little traction. Many Third World nations abstained rather than backing Moscow's agenda. It would fall to Mikhail Gorbachev to try a different approach at the United Nations.

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• 6. Dissolution and Succession

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  Mikhail Gorbachev shifted the Soviet approach at the United Nations. His government made repeated calls for the UN to play a larger role in resolving superpower and regional conflicts. Those proposals were not adopted, but they marked a genuine departure from decades of obstructionism. That new posture was cut short by the Soviet Union's collapse.

  On the 21st of December 1991, eleven Soviet republics signed the Alma-Ata Protocol. It established the Commonwealth of Independent States and declared that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. The Baltic states and Georgia were not among the signatories. The Protocol specified that the Russian Federation would assume all Soviet Union membership in the United Nations. This included the permanent seat on the Security Council.

  On the 24th of December 1991, Soviet permanent representative Yuli Vorontsov delivered a letter to the UN Secretary-General from Russian president Boris Yeltsin. The letter stated that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. Russia would assume all Soviet rights and obligations under the UN Charter. The letter circulated among UN member states without objection. Soviet representatives already serving in UN agencies continued in their posts as Russian representatives, without presenting new credentials. Ambassador Vorontsov became the first Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations.

  Gorbachev resigned on the 25th of December 1991. The Soviet of the Republics dissolved the following day. On the 31st of January 1992, Boris Yeltsin occupied the Russian Federation's seat at the Security Council. The session was a summit attended by heads of state and government from around the world. The letter Vorontsov had delivered a few weeks earlier required no vote, no negotiation, and no new credentials. A forty-six-year membership had changed hands in a single page.

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