Word: troika
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...Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and their aides sat down to lunch at the Soviet Mission to the U.N. in Manhattan, someone discovered that a package of Russian cigarettes on the table bore the brand name Troika. This allusion to the Soviet U.N. policy created general hilarity. The actual remarks are not known, but it is just possible that someone asked Gromyko: "Are you vetoing more and enjoying it less...
Meanwhile. Assembly President Mongi Slim bustled about the corridors, dickering, discussing and listening to all sides of the unsettled argument over the succession to Dag Hammarskjold's vacant post of Secretary-General. The Soviet plan no longer encompassed merely a troika, a three-headed executive. Now Russian Delegate Valerian Zorin was talking about a four-man body-two neutralists (African and Asian), a Communist and a Westerner -each, presumably, with a veto over the others that would render the whole operation useless. Said one U.N. diplomat: "You could call them the four Marxist Brothers...
Nose Count. Meanwhile India's waspish diplomatic swami, V.K. Krishna Menon, casting himself in the role of the great mediator, told everyone that neither the troika nor the temporary Secretary-General would work. He had no plan of his own, simply kept urging compromise. "You value this organization, don't you?" he would ask unaligned delegates. "Then you'd better get the U.S. and its allies to compromise, to meet the Russians halfway...
...nose count indicated a majority of the General Assembly against the troika and the Afro-Asians far from favoring it as a group. But a meeting of Africans and Asians hurriedly convened to discuss the matter did not entirely go along with the U.S.'s argument for an interim Secretary-General approved by the Assembly alone. The meeting broke up with nothing settled except the prospect that the argument might drag on for weeks. At week's end, however, the U.S. became convinced that it would be able to win the votes for a temporary administrator. Secretary Rusk...
...Russian troika proposal would mean little more than anarchy. "Even the three horses of the ancient troika did not have three drivers going in different directions. They had only one-and so must the United Nations...