Severyan Dyakonov
Severyan studied at the University of Paris 7 and Concordia University, earning his PhD from the Geneva Graduate Institute in 2022. His thesis examined Soviet public diplomacy in India during the 1950s–60s, and he has published several texts on Soviet Indian educational, medical, and cultural exchanges. Since 2022 he has held Swiss National Science Foundation and Canadian SSHRC grants for a project on Soviet Red Cross internationalism, conducted at Harvard, NYU, Carleton, and the University of Fribourg. Severyan is also a Research Associate at the Geneva Graduate Institute’s Center for Digital Humanities, working on digitizing archival sources, including the Ukrainian Red Cross in Exile, 1939-45.
University of Fribourg
Session
The USSR was one of the founders of the United Nations, yet its participation in UN agencies and other Western based international organizations was neither straightforward nor consistent. The Soviet Red Cross oversaw vast territories after WWII including Eastern Germany, Eastern Europe, parts of Iran, Northeast China, and North Korea, with access to prisoners of war from across Europe and Asia. In 1946 the Soviets were elected to the executive board of the International League of Red Cross Societies, followed by membership in the Standing Commission of the International Red Cross in 1952. By the late 1950s the USSR had also joined UNESCO and WHO, though this policy had certain limits. Although a founding country of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the USSR never formally joined it.
This paper draws on previously unexamined reports of the first Soviet representative at the International Red Cross – Nikolay Tchikalenko, the League’s undersecretary who lived and worked in Geneva from 1962 to 1965, as well as FAO archival documents on failed negotiations with Moscow in 1968. Tchikalenko’s reports reveal Soviet mistrust of “International Geneva,” perceived as infiltrated by American intelligence agents. At the same time, Moscow saw opportunities to advance foreign policy goals by engaging representatives of the decolonized world, while Western actors sought Soviet participation to legitimize new development programs in Africa and Asia as approved by the Socialist world.
FAO, one of the UN’s most important organizations in the fight against hunger, embodied goals consistent with socialist values. Yet the Soviets rejected FAO’s support for landowning farmers as incompatible with socialist principles of public land ownership. In 1968 FAO president Boerma travelled to Moscow and Leningrad to secure Soviet membership, and the deal seemed nearly complete. Ultimately, however, the Soviet Foreign Ministry decided against joining.