Reds in Blue by Louis Howard Porter

Author:Louis Howard Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.3 Russian translators posing for Director-General Evans’s newsletter in March 1957. © UNESCO. Collection of UNESCO Archives.

Although Delavenay agreed that the Russian Translation Section should consist only of Soviet specialists and promised to replace the expatriated Russians when they retired or their contracts expired, the Soviet UNESCO Commission continued to have difficulty finding Soviet nationals with the requisite experience translating in international organizations. While the émigré translators, having attained proficiency in the esoteric terminology of UNESCO, received positive evaluations, Soviet agencies preferred to send temporary translators who did not remain at UNESCO long enough to become conversant in the organization’s jargon.43 In 1958, the “struggle” over the Russian Translation Section became, in the words of two Soviet translators, “particularly acute,” as the émigrés, worried that their jobs might “be in jeopardy,” exploited the fact that the “head of the section was in their hands” to “not only keep their posts, but also take open ones.” By 1959, however, the Soviet Union had taken over the editorships in the section and five of the six translator slots.44 At first, Salomon came across to the chief of the UNESCO Bureau of Personnel as “very disturbed” at the prospect of a retirement forced on him to appease the Soviet state, quarreling over the original conditions of his contract. But in June, he relented and stepped down. A Soviet citizen took up the position even though UNESCO leaders judged him as “not yet fit for the job.”45

In other departments, Soviet UNESCO staff judged their colleagues as anticommunist and saw the hand of anti-Soviet elements behind any actions UNESCO officials took that ran counter to Soviet interests. For Director Kovda, the UNESCO leadership were lackeys of UN headquarters in New York. “The fundamental directives of UNESCO go from New York through Hammarskjöld with whom [UNESCO Director-General] Maheu has constant consultations,” the Soviet scientist groused.46 Martynovskii, in his position overseeing aid to “weakly-developed” countries, likewise viewed Americans under his watch as saboteurs. “The American UNESCO employees,” he complained, “clearly carry out a pro-Western policy, . . . directing their efforts so as to link UNESCO with organizations”—such as the International Bank for Reconstruction, the Ford Foundation, and the Carnegie Endowment—where “the influence of America is greater than it is in UNESCO.”47

For many Soviet international civil servants, the power relations and administrative procedures permeating the UNESCO Secretariat replicated the authoritarian hierarchy undergirding capitalism. Characterizing UNESCO’s bureaucracy as having failed to transcend its capitalist realities and live up to its lofty universal ideals, Soviet citizens criticized its brand of world governance. In a 1957 analysis of her work settings, Zhegalova claimed to have lifted the veil of false bourgeois democracy that concealed Western domination in her department. “All of the most important issues concerning the so-called ‘department policy,’ ” she explained, “are discussed at meetings convened by the director of the department or one of his two deputies.” Although “this organization of work is seemingly of a democratic nature,” Zhegalova warned that, “essentially, these meetings have almost no

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