ALLIES AND RUSSIA.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 64, Issue 1, 12 October 1943, Page 3

ALLIES AND RUSSIA.

THE PENDING CONFERENCE. NEED FOR UNDERSTANDING’. (Special Correspondent, N.Z.P.A.) (Rec. 9.35 a.m.) LONDON, Oct. 11. Mr J. L. Garvin, commenting in the “Sunday Express” on the threePower debates which are expected to start at Moscow before the end of this week, says that they are-“com-parable in their political .importance with the signal military events. No more momentous discussion has been held during this war or in any epoch.” I-Ie assumes that the preparatory stage now impending will precede a conference between Mr Eden, Mr Cordell Hull and M. Molotov on war aims and peace principles. “We may take it for certain,” says Mr Garvin, “that some penetrating questions, both of action and, of principle, will have to be left over until President Roosevelt and Mr Churchill meet M. Stalin face to face. That meeting will either make assurance doubly sure for the common cause of the United Nations or produce a razor edge of divided destinies. The opening of the discussions in Moscow cannot be as smooth as cream. For some months the tone of the Soviet press on every question of difference has often been rough and rasping. “There is as much misunderstanding on Western motives by Russia as of Russian feelings by the West. There will have to be frank, even drastic/ speaking on both sides, without irritation either. In that process this country, through Mr Eden, will have to take its part, but the supreme business of British policy is to work in every way for constructive conciliation. We have to examine every specific question on its practical merits in the harder light of Russian realism as well as in the general of Atlantic idealism. Some balance between these two will have to be struck. That and nothing else is the crux.”

Mr Garvin says that the Russians are still sore that the second front (which is now absolutely assured on a massive scale) has not come in time to bring about the military destruction of Hitlerism this year.