740.0011 EW (Peace)/10–648: Airgram
The Minister in Bulgaria (Heath) to the Secretary of State
A–181. I spoke with George Andreitchin, Special Assistant to Foreign Minister Kolarov, with regard to the Bulgarian memorandum of September 291 which asserts, with bland cynicism, in contradiction to our aide-mémoire of September 23, that Bulgaria has fully lived up to its Peace Treaty obligations to assure fundamental human and [Page 380] political rights in Bulgaria. Andreitchin asserted that “they” (implying Kolarov and the Bulgarian Communist hierarchy) really believed that Bulgaria had lived up to these treaty obligations.
I remarked that I much preferred the frankness of Lenin who had not pretended that the stage of “dictatorship of the proletariat” was “democratic” or protected human and political rights. Andreitchin made no attempt to contend that human rights were protected in Bulgaria but went on to argue that the United States had supported the application for membership in the United Nations of countries where human and political rights were far from secure as, for example, Portugal. Why did we not approve Bulgaria’s entrance into the United Nations and, if we had complaints about her system of government, we could then debate them before that forum? I replied that we had not approved the candidacy of Spain and that the case of Bulgaria and the other satellites was entirely different since peace treaties and the Yalta agreement, which must be respected if we were to have a progressive and peaceful world, solemnly and specifically provided for protection of human and political liberties. Andreitchin remarked regretfully that there had been a possibility of a freer system developing in Communist Russia, but the first international war against Russia, then the civil war and only a few years after a second world war followed by a revolution of “polarization” of power between the Soviets and the United States has maintained a situation of instability and suspicion in which one could not even “trust one’s own brother” and made a régime of human freedoms impossible—for the time being. I replied that the actions and the thesis advanced by Soviet Russia were bringing into being an antithetical doctrine of overwhelming strength in favor of personal freedoms. I had no doubt that this movement for liberty would succeed—sooner or later, in one manner or another—and I hoped that the synthesis between the Communist point of view and the historic movement for human liberties would be peacefully achieved.