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Reds in Blue
 Reds in Blue
UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet
Internationalist Imagination
LOUIS HOWARD PORTER
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
Publication of this book was made possible, in part, by a grant from the First Book
Subvention Program of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress
ISBN 978–0–19–765630–3
eISBN 978–0–19–765632–7

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197656303.001.0001
For L. J. and Georgia
 Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction: Really-Existing World Governance and Soviet Social

ism

PART I. CONVERGING INTERNATIONALISMS

1. Dual Power in World Governance: The USSR Out of UNESCO, 19
45–1953
2. The Key to the Whole System: The USSR in UNESCO, 1954–195
9
3. Strange Bedfellows: The USSR and UNESCO in a Changing Worl
d, 1960–1967

PART II. EVERYDAY WORLD GOVERNANCE

4. “No Neutral Men”: Soviet International Civil Servants and Life in
the Soviet Colony in Paris
5. Working for the World: Soviet International Civil Servants in the
UNESCO Secretariat
6. Gathering for One World: Soviet Participation in UNESCO’s Intern
ational Public Sphere
7. Reading a Better World: Soviet Participation in UNESCO’s Readin
g Public

Conclusion: A University in the Air

Notes
Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgments

When I stumbled onto this topic about a decade ago, I had no idea
what I was doing or getting myself into. This changed only thanks to
the colleagues, friends, and family who helped me figure it out along
the way. In its initial form as a dissertation written at the University
of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, the project benefited from
the thoughtful and compassionate mentorship of my graduate
adviser, Donald J. Raleigh, who generously shared his immense
knowledge of the field of Soviet history while allowing me the
independence to follow my own intellectual journey. His advice on
how to navigate the complexities of the historical profession was
crucial in ensuring this book’s completion. I also learned a lot from
other members of my dissertation committee (Chad Bryant, Louise
McReynolds, Eren Tasar, and Susan Pennybacker), all of whom
improved the story I tell here by helping me place it in broader
chronological and geographical contexts. Before I defended my
dissertation before this committee, I presented an earlier version of
chapter 5 at the Carolina Seminar: Russia and Its Empires, East and
West, where fellow graduate students (including, among others,
Dakota Irvin and Virginia Olmsted-McGraw) asked insightful
questions.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the summer of 2020, I
moved my family halfway across the country to start a new job at
Texas State University. Having never spent more than forty-eight
hours in Texas and unsettled by the anxieties of lockdown, I could
not have foreseen the supportive and vibrant communities that
would welcome me in the Lone Star state. Since then, I have had
the good fortune of working with an exceptional group of scholars in
the Department of History at Taylor-Murphy Hall. The Swinney
Writing Group (Margaret Menninger, Carrie Ritter, Elizabeth Bishop,
and other colleagues) workshopped a segment of this book, giving
me a better understanding of how I wanted to organize the
chapters. More important, the History Department at Texas State has
treated me like a human being, offering kindness and empathy when
life intervened. It is hard to imagine a better department chair than
Jeff Helgeson, whose flexibility and empathy have made the book
writing process considerably less stressful. Likewise, the mentorship
of Ken Margerison, who continued to offer words of wisdom even
after his retirement, has clarified and enriched my time at Texas
State. I am also thankful to José Carlos de la Puente for easing me
into my service duties in the department, thereby giving me the time
needed to put the finishing touches on this book. Last, I have been
incredibly lucky to work alongside Miranda Sachs and Justin
Randolph, who have extended a helping hand when my family was
going through difficult times.
The thinking behind this book has been shaped by diverse
feedback from scholars in the field. At the annual meetings of the
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
and the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies (SCSS), discussants,
chairs, co-panelists, and members of panel audiences offered
perceptive observations and probing questions that led me to
sudden epiphanies. Other scholars have improved my approach to
this subject through extensive written reflections. Parts of chapter 7
of this book have been published as “ ‘Our International Journal’: UN
Publications and Soviet Internationalism After Stalin,” Russian
Review 80, no. 4 (2021): 641–60. As I developed this article, the
constructive comments of the Russian Review editorial team
(particularly Associate Editor Brigid O’Keeffe) and the journal’s
reviewers inspired me to reframe my project and sharpen its
arguments.
In the course of conducting research and writing, I received
financial and other forms of aid from a variety of sources. The
Fulbright US Student Program and various grants from the UNC
Department of History kickstarted my archival work in Russia and at
the UNESCO Archives in Paris, France. At these archives, I unearthed
documents with the assistance of knowledgeable specialists
(particularly archivists Adele Torrance and Eng Sengsavang at
UNESCO). In addition, I completed my dissertation with the help of a
writing fellowship from the UNC Graduate School; wrote a proposal
for the book while living on funds from ASEEES’s Robert C.
Tucker/Stephen F. Cohen Dissertation Prize; and used a Research
Enhancement Program (REP) grant from Texas State to take a last-
minute research trip. As the book became a reality, it also received
funds from the ASEEES First Book Subvention Program. Moreover,
the inclusion of the photos in this book would not have been
possible without the permissions and audiovisual teams at various
repositories (UNESCO, Eastview Information Services, Alamy, and
the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library), while Corinne Schwab
graciously assented to my reproduction of an excellent photo taken
by her father, Éric Schwab.
At Oxford University Press (OUP), I had the privilege of working
with Susan Ferber, who patiently guided me through the process of
writing my first book. Her astute comments and incisive edits on the
penultimate draft made what follows a much better read. Similarly,
the two scholars she selected to review the manuscript offered both
encouraging words and gentle criticisms, cajoling me to make
important changes that I might otherwise have been too stubborn to
make. I also appreciate the hard work of the copyediting, indexing,
and other professionals at OUP and appreciate their steering this
book through production.
And finally, my family has made possible my career, providing me
with the kind of love and support necessary to keep my eyes on the
prize. I am thankful beyond words to my wife, Liz, who has put up
with the erratic work schedule, long trips abroad, and financial
precarity part and parcel to this profession. Her confidence in me
has seen me through. My parents, Karen and Lou, are the best
anyone could have, having my back and cheering me on during
every stretch of this crazy trip called life. I have grown to appreciate
their love and guidance even more since the arrival into the world of
my two rays of sunshine, Louis James and Georgia Porter. Through
rain, wind, and water, seeing their shining faces makes this all
worthwhile.
 Abbreviations

AN SSSR Academy of Sciences of the USSR

BMS UNESCO Bureau for Relations with Member States
BPM UNESCO Bureau of Personnel and Management
BSE Great Soviet Encyclopedia
BSSR Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic
CAME Conference of Allied Ministers of Education
CBS Columbia Broadcasting System
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
COMINFORM Communist Information Bureau
COMINTERN Communist International
CSCE Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe
DST Direction de la surveillance du territoire
ECOSOC UN Economic and Social Council
EEC European Economic Community
EPTA UN Expanded Program of Technical Assistance
FAO Food and Agriculture Organization
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
FRG Federal Republic of Germany
GDR German Democratic Republic
GKES State Committee for Foreign Economic Relations
GKKS State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries
IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency
ICSAB International Civil Service Advisory Board
IDA International Development Association
IIB International Institute of Bibliography
IIL Soviet Foreign Literature Publishing House
IINiT USSR Institute for the History of Science and Technology
IIT Bombay Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
ILO International Labor Organization
KPSS Communist Party of the Soviet Union
MGPIIIa Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages
MID USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs
MINEDEUROPE Ministers of Education of Member States of the European Region
MINVUZ USSR Ministry of Higher and Secondary Special Education
MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NKID USSR People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs
OAS Organization of American States
OAS Organisation de l’armée secrete
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
PRC People’s Republic of China
TAB UN Technical Assistance Board
TsK KPSS Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
UDC Universal Decimal Classification System
Ukrainian SSR Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
UN United Nations
UNCSW UN Commission on the Status of Women
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
UNKRA United Nations Reconstruction Agency, Korea
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
VGBIL USSR All-Union State Library of Foreign Literature
VOKS USSR All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with the Abroad
WHO World Health Organization
Reds in Blue
 Introduction
Really-Existing World Governance and Sovie
t Socialism

In August 1974, the American magazine Saturday Review published

a special issue, “2024 A.D.—A Probe into the Future.” Released the
same month that President Richard M. Nixon resigned from the
presidency in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the issue
presented essays in which an assortment of American and foreign
luminaries (Neil Armstrong, Norman Podhoretz, Kurt Waldheim,
Milovan Djilas, and others) predicted the fate of the world in fifty
years. Among the contributors to the magazine was nuclear physicist
turned disarmament activist Andrei Sakharov, who shared his take
on humanity’s prospects from the USSR. In his contribution, the
Soviet scientist looked to the future to clarify the problems of the
present, enumerating the many “destructive tendencies of
contemporary life” in the 1970s, from environmental degradation to
the threat of nuclear war. For Sakharov, the fight against these
threats necessitated that humanity reverse “the disintegration of the
world into antagonistic groups of states” and instead facilitate the
“convergence of the socialist and capitalist systems.” In his eyes, an
important institutional mechanism for the realization of this
convergence already existed. “A major role must be played,” he
declared, “by international organizations, such as the United Nations
and UNESCO, in which I would like to see the beginning of a world
government with guiding principles based on global human rights.”
Sakharov went on to outline “several futurological hypotheses”
built on this premise of global integration through world governance.
He foresaw in 2024 an earth divided into a “Work Territory (WT)”
and “Preserve Territory (PT).” The smaller WT zone, “where people
will spend most of their time,” would consist of “giant automated
and semi-automated factories” as well as “super-cities” of apartment
buildings with cutting-edge technology. These urban cores would be
encircled by sprawling suburbs, which in turn would give way to
stretches of farmland producing enough to feed the world’s
population. In the air above the WT, “flying cities” powered by solar
and nuclear energy would orbit the earth. Beneath the earth’s
surface, a “system of subterranean cities for sleep and
entertainment, with service stations for underground transportation
and mining” would bustle out of sight. Meanwhile, the larger PT
zone would function as a world park, “set aside for maintaining the
earth’s ecological balance, for leisure activities, and for man to
actively reestablish his own natural balance.”
This extravagant prophesy was premised on the emancipatory
potential of the global exchange of knowledge and information.
Sakharov envisioned the world of the 2020s as not only enjoying the
fruits of spectacular technological leaps (such as the replacement of
the automobile with “a battery-powered vehicle on mechanical
‘legs’ ”), but also the creation of a “single global telephone and
videophone system” as well as a “universal information system
(UIS).” The latter, he dreamed, would “give everyone access at any
given moment to the contents of any book that has ever been
published or any magazine or any fact.” Obviously, Sakharov
cautioned, such an advanced information network would not exist
until “far in the future, more than fifty years from now.” But once it
did appear, the network’s “true historic role” would be “to break
down the barriers to the exchange of information among countries
and people.”1
Sakharov’s identification of the UN system, and the United
Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
in particular, as the building blocks for this future world order reveals
a deeper truth about these institutions and the Soviet experience of
them. After the death of Josef Stalin in 1953, Soviet citizens from a
range of backgrounds worked in the bureaucracies, attended the
conferences, and read the publications of noncommunist
international organizations. In the course of participating in these
activities, they experimented with novel ideas and practices based
on the premise of world governance. This experimentation, though
at times leading to grandiose schemes, remained far more grounded
in the realities of the twentieth century than Sakharov’s fantastical
reverie. Nevertheless, the discourses and practices in which
international organizations included a small but influential part of the
Soviet population contained the promise and possibility of a better
world in the future. For these Soviet internationalists, the UN
method of world governance offered a flawed yet important tool for
solving the world’s problems. It encouraged them to declare
membership in an international community and to act out of a sense
of world civic duty to address these problems. Citizens of the USSR
and of the world, Soviet participants in international organizations
used these bodies to imagine and work for global change for the
benefit of their country and humanity writ large.

This book is a history of these works and imaginations. Examining

Soviet participation in UNESCO from the country’s enrollment in the
organization in 1954 to the eve of détente in 1967, it chronicles the
rich experiences of Soviet citizens in the distinct milieus made by
international organizations. Due to a widely held assumption that the
world needed to transcend the nationalist belligerence that had led
to the massively destructive conflicts of the first half of the twentieth
century, the number of international organizations grew
exponentially in the postwar era. The rise of this constellation of
internationalist entities, which revolved around the newly created UN
and its specialized agencies, heralded the advent of multilateral
diplomacy as a major tool for solving global issues in every
imaginable sphere of human activity. These organizations sought to
reform the established order through varying degrees of
institutionalized cooperation among peaceful nations. As a result,
they extended to the world’s population ideas of world governance,
world civic duty, and international community.
 Sakharov’s singling out of UNESCO reflects its unique status both
within the Soviet Union and the wider mid-twentieth-century world.
While the continued rapid growth in the number of international
organizations has since marginalized it as just one of many such
institutions, this UN specialized agency represented one of the most
radical and idealistic inventions of the postwar movement for world
governance.2 Founded in 1946 and headquartered in Paris, UNESCO
oversaw multilateral diplomacy in the expansive spheres of
education, science, and culture. The organization hosted
conferences for scholars and other professionals, released
publications on a variety of subjects, and provided educational
technical assistance around the globe. It operated as both a force in
its own right in the fields under its mandate and as an
intergovernmental sponsor of dozens of nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs).3
Before Stalin’s death in 1953, the USSR had, at best, an
ambivalent relationship with noncommunist international
organizations. Although it had helped found the United Nations, it
opposed making the world body much more than a coalition of the
great powers that had emerged as victors from the war.4 It refused
to join UNESCO and other major UN agencies beyond the Security
Council and General Assembly. In these early years of the Cold War,
the Soviet state accused UNESCO in particular of spreading
“cosmopolitanism,” an epithet drawn from the xenophobic and anti-
Semitic campaigns inside the Soviet Union that coincided with the
ratcheting up of international tensions. After Stalin’s death, however,
the new Soviet leadership joined UNESCO and a number of other
international organizations, including the International Labor
Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organization (WHO).5
Soviet entry into these institutions marked a watershed moment
in Soviet thinking about world governance. From the 1950s onward,
noncommunist international organizations became legitimate options
in the toolkit from which the Soviet state drew to conduct diplomacy
in areas beyond direct negotiations over war and peace. Although
the USSR continued to boycott a handful of these organizations over
specific ideological concerns, the majority of them were redefined as
progressive phenomena central to post-Stalinist foreign policy. In
1959, G. A. Mozhaev, an international legal scholar working for the
Soviet UNESCO Commission—which oversaw the country’s
participation in the UN agency—framed noncommunist international
organizations as positive forces on the world stage in a
groundbreaking Marxist-Leninist analysis. “The huge increase in
international organizations and the enhancement of their role in
international life,” he theorized, reflected “the objective process of
the further complication and development of international relations,
caused by the unprecedented rise of science and technology and the
enormous growth of the consciousness of peoples.”
Mozhaev predicted that such institutions would only become more
important as the world became more interconnected. “There is every
reason to believe that in the future, with the acceleration of social
progress, the role of international organizations in the system of
world political, economic, scientific-technical, and cultural relations
will steadily grow.” Moreover, no international organization had more
strategic importance than UNESCO. In Mozhaev’s words, the agency
deserved special attention as “the largest and most important
international organization in the areas of education, science, and
culture.” As an intergovernmental sun around which a multitude of
NGOs orbited, UNESCO was also “the key to the whole system of
international nongovernmental organizations of an ideological
nature.”6
The normalization of Soviet relations with UNESCO after 1953
enabled Soviet nationals to engage in global discussions on topics
ranging from their individual professions to worldwide problems.
Recent histories of Soviet internationalism have shown the
aftereffects at home and abroad of the country’s bilateral cultural
diplomacy with countries, blocs, or particular “worlds.”7 But the role
of international organizations—and particularly the UN—in the
practice of Soviet internationalism remains understudied, even as the
world body has attracted renewed interest over the last two
decades.8 Scholars have recast the UN as more than an alternative
setting for diplomacy by exploring how it was embedded in and
shaped global processes.9
By putting these hitherto siloed scholarships on Soviet and UN
internationalisms in conversation, this book provides the first history
of the Soviet reception of world governance through international
organization. At first glance, the histories of UNESCO’s method of
world governance and the socialist internationalism of the Soviet
state run on parallel tracks, forming unique intellectual genealogies
as dichotomous as the Cold War. The juxtaposition of the symbolic
imagery of UNESCO and the USSR illustrates the divergent end-goals
of these two internationalist institutions. On the one hand, the
hammer and sickle on the red backdrop of the Soviet flag evokes the
militant struggle born out of the French revolutionary tradition and
aimed at uniting workers of the world to upend the established order
under a star pointing to the five inhabited continents.10 On the other
hand, the substitution of the “UNESCO” acronym for the columns of
the Parthenon on the UNESCO logo is emblematic of the
organization’s ambition to serve as the preserver of the culture and
knowledge built atop the foundation of the established order.
Harkening back to a time before the revolutionary tradition extolled
by the Soviet Union, the UNESCO logo manifests the organization’s
mission to act as the keeper of the tradition of the Enlightenment
and as the reincarnation of the genteel “Republic of Letters” that
preceded the upheaval unleashed by the French Revolution.
Figure I.1 These two Soviet stamps from 1976 depict the symbolic imagery of
the USSR (left) and UNESCO (right). They reflect how both Soviet and UNESCO
internationalisms harbored global aspirations but differed in their self-conceptions
as (respectively) disruptor or curator of the established order. Courtesy of
Wikimedia Commons and Dreamstime.com. © Bob Suir.

The oppositional end-goals of these two institutionalized

internationalisms, however, conceal their critical points of theoretical
convergence. Just as Marxism took as self-evident certain
presuppositions and frameworks born out of the Enlightenment,
Soviet internationalism shared presuppositions and frameworks with
the internationalist currents of thought that would inform UNESCO.
All such internationalisms rely on specific features of modernity, such
as new means of travel and communication, to imagine international
community.11 Both Soviet and UNESCO internationalisms also sought
to mobilize this international community to international civic action,
appealing to a sense of civic duty to make a better world. Both
belong, in other words, to what historian Mark Mazower calls a
“larger genus of secular internationalist utopias,” all of which
harbored “a vision of a better future for mankind, one that lies
within our grasp and power and promises our collective
emancipation.”12
More concretely, Soviet engagement with UNESCO continued a
tradition of Russian and Soviet experimentation with noncommunist
visions of world governance, world civic duty, and international
community. Indeed, Soviet enrollment in UNESCO and other UN
agencies institutionalized long-standing efforts by Russian and later
Soviet citizens to imagine and work for a better world through
worldwide civic action and governance. As far back as the late
nineteenth century, movements such as the one to globalize
Esperanto—an international language invented in the Russian Empire
and officially endorsed by UNESCO in 1954—extended to Russian
subjects of the Tsar a sense of world civic duty and creative
belonging to international community.13 Likewise, historians have
traced the kind of popularly mandated world governance that would
inform the UN system back to the Russian Empire and its last ruler,
Nicholas II, who initiated the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conferences on
international law. Unlike earlier instances of great-power
multilateralism, these highly publicized “peace conferences” inspired
citizens from around the world to imagine themselves as part of an
international community with influence over world governance.
Members of the Russian educated public readily joined this
community, organizing meetings and collecting thousands of
signatures in favor of world governance at the Hague.14 In the same
spirit, representatives of the Russian Duma, the quasi-parliamentary
body created after the 1905 revolution, took an active part before
1914 in the Interparliamentary Union (IPU), the first international
organization practicing world governance based on popular
representation of an imagined international community.15
The cataclysms of the Great War and the 1917 revolution
disrupted the ties between the country and such noncommunist
movements for world governance. The new Soviet state refused to
join the IPU, only returning to it in 1955—a year after Soviet
enrollment in UNESCO.16 The Soviet state also sat out the League of
Nations, the interwar predecessor to the postwar UN, for all but five
years of its existence. Consequently, the USSR had a fleeting official
presence at UNESCO’s direct institutional predecessor, the League’s
International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation.17 Instead,
Soviet leaders promoted their own extensive apparatuses for
international solidarity, such as the Communist International
(Comintern) and the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with the
Abroad (VOKS).18
Yet neither the League nor the Soviet diplomatic complex had a
monopoly on interwar initiatives premised on world governance,
world civic duty, and international community. In fact, UNESCO’s
method of world governance through intellectual and cultural
exchange had antecedents in other, lesser-known projects for global
integration, a number of which earned the support of members of
the Soviet educated public from the interwar period.
Before the Second World War, for example, the ambition to put
intellectual exchange in the service of world governance took on its
most fantastical incarnation in the utopian schemes of Belgian
pioneer of information science Paul Otlet. Founder of the
International Institute of Bibliography (IIB) in Brussels, Otlet worked
to create a “Universal Bibliography,” or a reference database for all
printed texts in existence. To organize this universal corpus of
knowledge, he developed the Universal Decimal Classification
System (UDC), a modified version of the Dewey Decimal System.
These ventures constituted the information building blocks of a more
far-reaching plan to create a global information “depot” that would
house international associations, a library, museum, and
“international university.” This “Mundaneum,” as Otlet called it, would
also be the seat of a world government that, accompanied by the
creation of a world calendar and world language, would facilitate
global intellectual integration.19 Otlet’s dream of realizing world
government through intellectual exchange anticipated the aspirations
that some of its founders brought to UNESCO. Picking up where
Otlet left off, UNESCO would act as a world “depot” for knowledge;
serve as an intergovernmental hub for NGOs; and operate as a
leading international organization for information and library science.
Otlet’s internationalist project also acquired an ardent fan base
among Soviet librarians and bibliographers.20 After 1917, his UDC
rose to power alongside the Bolsheviks. In the early 1920s, the
young Soviet state mandated the use of the UDC in libraries and in
the Knizhnaia letopis’, the national bibliography released by the
USSR State Central Book Chamber.21
Other interwar predecessors to UNESCO would similarly inspire
Soviet citizens. The city of Bruges played host in the 1930s to world
congresses calling for international action to protect culture in times
of war. These congresses were part of an international grassroots
movement inspired by the idiosyncratic ideas of Russian émigré
painter Nicholas Roerich. In the late 1920s, Roerich had called for an
international pact that would safeguard cultural and intellectual
heritage from the mass destruction of war. This proposal culminated
in an Inter-American treaty known as the “Roerich Pact,” which
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed at a ceremony in the
White House in 1935.22
Roerich’s movement was based on a conviction that peace
depended on—in the words of one Roerich supporter—“the
sensitizing of human consciousness” through global cultural
conservation. This belief presaged UNESCO’s core premise that, in
the words of its charter, “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is
in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be
constructed.”23 In addition, Roerich’s international treaty was the
immediate predecessor to UNESCO’s various agreements to protect
world heritage in the postwar era.24 The Russian émigré’s thinking
would also influence Soviet internationalism. After Stalin’s death,
Soviet authorities incorporated Roerich’s work into their own
message of “world peace,” commemorating his life and activism as
part of a shared internationalist tradition.25
Like Roerich and Otlet, UNESCO and the Soviet state practiced
“transformative agendas” to reconstruct “the minds of men” through
universal enlightenment. They conceived of intellectual exchange—
and the globalization of information, knowledge, and culture in
particular—as a means of refashioning subjects of the present into
citizens of better worlds to come.26 The hopes of UNESCO’s founders
that the organization would act as an intellectual and moral center
for the world echoed on a global level the utopian pretensions of the
Russian (and later Soviet) intelligentsia to serve “as the conscience
of the nation” by exemplifying “the learning of all humanity” and
employing this learning to create “new people.” Yet while the
Bolsheviks launched campaigns to create a “new Soviet man,”
UNESCO aimed to mold a new internationalist man exhibiting an
“internationally minded” consciousness.27 If Stalin considered Soviet
writers “engineers of the human soul” for socialism, UNESCO viewed
itself as an engineer of the human mind for peace. As this book will
show, the Soviet experience of the UN agency reflected these
homologous utopian premises, which encompassed a spectrum—
from red to blue—of internationalist modernity.

The theoretical convergences of Soviet and UNESCO

internationalisms translated into similarities in how the two played
out in practice. In the end, both Soviet socialism and world
governance suffered the same fate—that of idealistic projects
realized in institutions (the USSR and the UN) best known for their
failures to live up to their promises. As such, they epitomize the
chasm between idealistic aspirations and actual implementation.
Attempts to bridge this chasm have thus defined the historical
scholarship on both institutions. In the case of the Soviet Union,
historian Michael David-Fox argues for the field “to move beyond
conceptual frameworks that segregate intentions and consequences,
ideas and circumstances, political programs and social reality, above
and below.” Rather, he advocates an examination of the
“interrelationships” of these opposites.28 In the case of international
organizations, historian Glenda Sluga similarly notes that “the history
of internationalism travels along a characteristic narrative line from
utopia to disillusionment, but no more than the tales that can be told
of imagined national communities.”29 This common tension between
the ideal and the real opens up an opportunity to write a history of
the Soviet encounter with world governance that highlights the
convergence of the two projects in practice and elucidates their
interrelationship.
In both contexts, the slippage and interplay between the ideal
and the real reflected utopian ambitions adjusted to the world as it
existed in the twentieth century. For instance, both universalist
projects ironically became defenders of the nation as the pillar of
world order. For its part, the USSR opposed more maximalist forms
of world government and vigorously protected the principle of
national sovereignty on the world stage.30 So did the UN. The world
body consisted of an inelegant amalgam of great-power diplomacy
and multilateral cooperation among nations glued together by
institutions mimicking the features of the modern state on a world
scale (civil service, branches of government, specialized ministries,
etc.). It thus reflected ambitions for varying degrees of world
governance mugged by the reality of national sovereignty and great-
power politics.31 Like the “really-existing” (as opposed to idealistic)
socialism of the USSR, the UN’s brand of “really-existing” world
governance accommodated lofty designs to the real world, emerging
out of the collision of diverse visions for global integration with the
exigencies of postwar international affairs.32
Part I of this book is a chronological history that begins at the
moment of this collision in the aftermath of the Second World War.
As chapter 1 shows, the USSR rejected UNESCO and much of the
rest of the UN system during the organization’s formative phase in
the late 1940s and early 1950s. This boycott would prove a
consequential mistake, allowing the West to shape the burgeoning
international organizational system, and hence world governance, in
its “really-existing” form. Chapter 2 turns to the years after Stalin’s
death in 1953, when the USSR entered UNESCO as part of a broader
recommitment to making a better world. Initiated by the new Soviet
leader N. S. Khrushchev in the context of his foreign policy of
“peaceful coexistence,” Soviet accession to UNESCO reflected the
optimistic faith in the superiority of the socialist system sweeping the
country in the 1950s. Inspired by this faith, Soviet officials set out to
demonstrate their system’s superiority within the walls of an
organization claiming to represent a universal international
community inclusive of both sides of the Cold War.
This utopian claim to universality, however, concealed the
persistence of the Western biases ingrained in the UN before 1953.
The source of these biases lay in the bureaucracies, or secretariats,
of the world body and its agencies—the less glamorous core of the
international organizational system that has been overlooked in favor
of its representative organs in New York (the Security Council and
General Assembly) and at its specialized agencies in Western
Europe.33 The authority to implement the programs adopted by
these representative organs lay in the international archipelago of
UN secretariats scattered from Manhattan to Paris and Geneva. Just
as the bureaucracy of a nation-state determines the implementation
of legislation drawn up by elected officials, the secretariats of the UN
system had considerable latitude to flesh out the resolutions passed
by the community of nations. Put simply, the delegations of member
states to different UN agencies showed up for debates or votes on
proposals and then left for their missions. The international civil
servants employed by UN secretariats then executed these proposals
and kept the organization running from day to day. These
bureaucrats acted as the carriers of the institutional memory and
culture of the UN. This UN “deep state,” more than any other feature
of the UN system, was the most concrete realization of world
government achieved by twentieth-century internationalists.34
An analysis of the world body that centers this bureaucratic core
reveals another similarity in the interplay of the ideal and the real in
the Soviet and UN contexts. Viewed in this way, the UN resembled
the USSR as an amalgamation of utopianism and bureaucracy,
employing practices and structures of the modern state to realize
universalist visions on an international scale. If the USSR amounted
to what Michael David-Fox has called an “intelligentsia-statist
modernity,” the UN—and UNESCO in particular—were a much less
coercive but nevertheless similar hybridization of intellectual
messianism and bureaucracy.35 In the case of UNESCO, the utopian
visions of men such as Otlet and Roerich became mired and
muddled in the agency’s red tape. Staffed with a ragtag bunch of
do-gooder pen-pushers with specialties in every imaginable field of
education, science, or culture, the UNESCO Secretariat grounded
fanciful intellectualism in the banalities of clericalism. Just as the
Soviet intelligentsia represented what historian Martin Malia
describes (drawing on Lev Trotsky and Milovan Djilas) as a “ ‘new
class’ ” or “ ‘bureaucracy’ ” of “white-collar personnel” shorn of the
“ ‘critical’ thought” of their prerevolutionary predecessors, UNESCO’s
overwhelmingly Western corps of bureaucratic intellectuals at once
personified and betrayed the utopianism of their internationalist
forebears.36
This “new class” of bureaucrat-internationalists perpetuated the
West’s advantage in UNESCO. As the third chapter makes clear, this
remained the case even as the composition of UNESCO
representative bodies (the UNESCO General Conference, or its
equivalent of the UN General Assembly, and the UNESCO Executive
Board, its veto-less version of the UN Security Council) changed as a
consequence of the acceleration of decolonization in the 1960s. The
induction of new countries as UNESCO member states eroded
Western hegemony over these representative bodies. But contrary to
the initial hopes of Soviet officials, the diminishment of Western
power and the crystallization of a new bloc of nations from the
“developing world” throughout the decade did not lead to a
strengthening of the socialist bloc in the international organizational
system. Instead, the bipolar world gave way to a pluralist one in
which this system began to fracture, but only after Soviet
internationalism had come to fully embrace UNESCO, and its method
of world governance, as staples in its repertoire.
While the UN reflected the realities of the world it sought to govern,
the world body nevertheless still bore the traces of its utopian
blueprints, continuing to embody the promise and possibility of other
forms of world unity not yet in existence. For this reason,
anthropologists of international organizations have characterized
them as “palaces of hope”—a designation these institutions have
lived up to since their founding.37 In the West, the creation of the
UN led to widespread anticipation in the early postwar years of a
more powerful world state governing a peaceful world community.38
In contrast, the American Right interpreted this prospect as a threat,
casting the UN as a proto-totalitarian menace harboring aspirations
interchangeable with the Soviet drive for global communism. In
1964, for example, John Stormer used his anticommunist manifesto,
None Dare Call It Treason, to accuse UN Secretary-General U Thant
of desiring a “one-world socialistic government financed by the
United States” as the ultimate “synthesis” of the dialectic of history.3
9 A decade earlier, Usher L. Burdick, Republican congressman from

North Dakota, declared that UNESCO in particular was “the most

dastardly undertaking of all that the United Nations had theretofore
contrived.” Under the guise of “spreading universal learning” for
“mutual understanding,” he charged, the agency conspired to
“create public opinion for the coming world government.”40
Unlike Stormer and Burdick, Soviet citizens who participated in
UNESCO activities after 1954 did not see in the UN a communist
proto-world state. They did, however, recognize the kernel of truth
that gave rise to this outlandish conflation—the homologous utopian
aspirations of the Soviet and UN projects for one world. As a result,
these Soviet citizens embraced “really-existing” world governance
because it extended to them a promise of world unity and peace
consonant with the core utopian promise of the Soviet state. In this
respect, the UN and USSR had in common not only their existence
as embers of utopias past, but also their ability to act as sparks for
utopias future. Of course, the Soviet state throughout its existence
based its legitimacy on keeping this spark alive. From the 1917
revolution onward, it relied on what historian Mark Steinberg calls a
“utopian impulse” to mobilize its citizens to build communism.41
Embedded in “really-existing socialism,” this impulse would take on a
new intensity just as the country joined UNESCO in the era of
optimism and “romanticism” that saw the launch of Sputnik, the
World Youth Festival, and the Cuban Revolution. As many Soviet
citizens during this time looked to the country’s past to reignite the
global emancipatory potential of the communist project, utopianism
pervaded Soviet prophesies of “catching up and overtaking the USA,”
the immanency of communism, and the spread of revolution in the
decolonizing world.42
Likewise, the UN’s method of world governance presented its own
brand of “romantic,” globally minded optimism, inviting Soviet
citizens to work toward and imagine a brighter future. It engaged
them in utopia as a means and an ends latent in the present.43 Just
as Soviet socialism promised the possibility of working to end class
conflict, UNESCO promised a way to work for a future without
international conflict. And just as socialism promised what theorist
Ruth Levitas has described as a “utopia of non-alienation” by means
of “the collective action of the working class,” the UN agency offered
universal belonging through world civic action.44
For the small but influential group of Soviet citizens active in the
UN agency, UNESCO’s visions of peace and international community
through enlightenment harmonized with the Soviet conception of
historical evolution toward universal futurity. Like the “imaginary
West” of the post-Stalin era, UNESCO’s ways of working for and
imagining a better world became “reinterpreted” as part of the
Soviet internationalist repertoire.45 Through the practice of “really-
existing” world governance, Soviet UNESCO participants came to
support the UN’s method of world governance and repurposed the
world body for their own internationalist expression. The reality of
the Cold War thus became imbued with practices, visions, and even
transient realizations of one-world unity amid the divisions of the
present.
Part II of this book turns its focus to these creative Soviet
practices of “everyday” world governance.46 Organized thematically,
it tells the stories of members of the Soviet intelligentsia who
participated in the three international publics formed by UNESCO. Ch
apters 4 and 5 chronicle the lives of Soviet white-collar professionals
who worked for world governance as public international civil
servants in the UNESCO bureaucracy. Chapter 6 explores the
thinking of Soviet scholars and intellectuals who contributed to the
international public sphere of UNESCO gatherings and collaborative
projects. Finally, chapter 7 illustrates UNESCO’s influence beyond the
privileged elite who traveled abroad. It demonstrates how the
international reading public of UNESCO publications encouraged
Soviet readers deep inside the USSR to experiment with ideas of
world governance, world civic duty, and international community.
The well-studied high diplomacy of Cold War confrontation in the
UN has for too long overshadowed these day-to-day Soviet
experiences of UN world governance. The UN system transformed
the lives of a diverse selection of Soviet citizens, who encountered it
not as neutral territory but as both a microcosm of world politics and
a sui generis universe. Whether engaging with UNESCO in-person or
from afar, Soviet citizens navigated the agency as a social, cultural,
and ideological complex suffused with an abundance of meanings
and power relations.
If the abundance of meanings inspired in Soviet UNESCO
participants hope for future world unity and peace, the organization’s
complex power relations grounded them in the divisions of the day.
Notwithstanding the frustrations arising from the latter, these
patriotic Soviet citizens came to view the UN system as a flawed but
valid vehicle for the expression of international solidarity and
activism for peace and a better world. Coexisting and overlapping
with the internationalism of the Soviet state, the UN’s brand of
internationalism extended to Soviet internationalists a means of
participating in a wider world while preserving their loyalties to the
Soviet project. In the process, they lived Cold War reality in its one-
world development.47
 PART I
CONVERGING INTERNATIONALISMS
 1
Dual Power in World Governance
The USSR Out of UNESCO, 1945–1953

In early 1947, Leonard S. Kenworthy, a UNESCO official, traveled to

the Western-occupied zones of Germany to give a lecture about the
new international organization to students enrolled in an American
literature class at the University of Frankfurt. Seated in a defunct
bomb shelter, the audience of German youth “listened intently” to
the UNESCO envoy’s talk. “When the period of questioning came,”
Kenworthy reported back to UNESCO, “they pounced upon this
opportunity.” In preparation for the lecture, the students, who had
come of age under the tutelage of the Nazis, read UNESCO: Its
Purpose and Its Philosophy, a small treatise in which UNESCO’s first
director-general, Julian Huxley, cast the organization as a vehicle for
fostering international intellectual exchange for the purpose of global
integration. Unsurprisingly, a handful of those enrolled in the course
reacted with skepticism to this internationalist ideology conceived as
the antithesis to the nationalist “New Order” of Nazism. “You can’t
develop world loyalty,” one of the German listeners chirped, “with an
eclectic philosophy like that!” Kenworthy characterized the response
of this group, which likely represented “the ‘cream of the crop’ of
German youth,” as mixed. As he relayed back to his superiors, they
“were alert, penetrating, and ready to be shown, but not ready to be
kidded.”1
The reluctance of some of these German students to embrace the
message delivered by Kenworthy illuminates the worldview informing
UNESCO’s architects and the historical juncture out of which the
organization emerged. Convinced that the inherent tribalism of
nationalist allegiance and an ignorance of other peoples had fueled
the revanchist regimes of the Second World War, UNESCO’s founders
set out to instrumentalize information, knowledge, and culture for
international-community building, world civic action, and world
governance. This internationalist project reflected a larger postwar
campaign to enhance the power of international organizations and,
in its more extreme iterations, forge a single world government
responsible for a cosmopolitan “world citizenship” that would either
coincide with, or replace, nationality as the primary form of
identification across the globe.
If the violent nationalism of the Axis powers lent a sense of
urgency to the mission of UNESCO and these various blueprints for
“one world,” however, new tensions challenged and shaped the
evolution of this internationalist crusade. Within months of
Kenworthy’s 1947 lecture in Germany, UNESCO’s utopian project ran
up against the Cold War and a fracturing of the world into two. The
new organization’s method of “really-existing” world governance,
with which Soviet citizens would experiment after 1954, emerged
out of this collision between hopes for the future and the world as it
was after the war.

The Missing Member State

UNESCO originated in a series of wartime brainstorming sessions in
London about how to reconstruct the educational and cultural
institutions of a Europe ravaged by the Nazi imperial project. In
October 1942, the president of the British Board of Education, R. A.
Butler, invited the ministers of education of European governments
waiting out the war in Britain to come together to tackle
“educational questions affecting the Allied countries of Europe and
the United Kingdom both during the war period and in the postwar
period.”2 The next month, ministers from governments-in-exile and
the British government attended the first meeting of the Conference
of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME).3 By 1945, CAME had
evolved into a multibranched agency with an executive bureau that
oversaw seven commissions dedicated to amassing data on the
resources of educational, scientific, and cultural institutions in
Europe.4
Early on in its work, the conference had recognized the necessity
of creating a new institution to take over its mission of overseeing
the expansive task of reconstructing Europe’s intellectual
infrastructure. As Jan Opocensky, a UNESCO participant and
historian, observed in his 1949 history of the agency, CAME not only
resolved to provide “educational relief” but also “explore[d] plans for
the formation of a permanent organization for inter-allied and
subsequently international cooperation in education matters in the
postwar period.”5 Serious deliberations over the form and mandate
of such an organization accelerated after CAME extended its
membership to the rest of the United Nations coalition. In the fall of
1943, the conference requested that the Soviet Union, the United
States, China, and other friendly governments send emissaries to its
gatherings.6 Early the next year, the United States sent a delegation
to a meeting of the conference. As historian Charles Dorn argues,
the American delegation, led by the pioneer of liberal internationalist
education, Senator J. William Fulbright, made sure that any postwar
“educational and cultural organization” would be incorporated into
the UN. By 1945, the United States also ended up shifting the
conversation from plotting a reconstruction agency to designing an
international organization that would promote exchange on a long-
term basis. In November 1945, a preparatory conference to establish
UNESCO convened in London.7
Although the Soviet embassy in London dispatched its first
secretary as an observer to CAME in 1943, it kept a cautious
distance from the proceedings of the conference. The Soviet Union
declined to send representatives to work on CAME’s multiple
commissions, replying tersely to some of these invitations that it did
“not have anybody here qualified for this purpose.”8 When the Soviet
first secretary started to show up at sessions of the conference’s
executive bureau, he remained aloof and asked only brief clarifying
questions over the years.9 In late 1943, the Soviet observer
approached his American counterpart at CAME to learn whether the
Americans intended to officially join the conference without
demanding “organizational changes.” In the course of their
conversation, the Soviet official conveyed his government’s wariness
about the nature and objectives of the gathering. According to the
American diplomat, the socialist representative expressed anxiety
over the possibility that any international “cultural conference” would
grant all states equal voting rights no matter their size. This
arrangement, he warned, “would give undue and perhaps dangerous
influence to small states.” He also revealed Soviet concerns about
the threat to sovereignty any future international educational
organization would pose. Although the country “might not feel great
hesitancy” about an organization whose “activities were confined to
the exchange of purely technical information,” it would be “extremely
reluctant to participate” in any organ that “undertook to deal with
the subject matter introduced in the curricula of national schools.”
Overall, the American observer surmised that the “USSR would
prefer to conduct its cultural relations bilaterally.”10
In the months leading up to the November 1945 preparatory
conference for the establishment of UNESCO, the Soviet ambassador
to the United Kingdom, F. T. Gusev, justified the USSR’s insistence on
spurning the inchoate international organization by arguing that only
the UN could authorize the creation of intergovernmental
organizations. “In the opinion of the Soviet govt [sic],” Gusev wrote
to American officials, “measures for the preparation and creation of
an organization for matters of enlightenment and culture . . . should
be taken by the Social-Economic Council of the . . . United Nations
after the formation of such council in the forthcoming first session of
the General Assembly.”11 Although UNESCO would fall under the
purview of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) after
1946, the two bodies had yet to iron out their future relationship.
The position of CAME as the architect of UNESCO therefore provided
the Soviet Union with an opportunity to delegitimize the enterprise
on the basis of its origins outside the UN.
 Continuing its work without Soviet involvement, the preparatory
conference aimed to produce an international organization oriented
toward impacting–in Opocensky’s words–“ ‘the man on the street.’ ”12
In his opening address to the conference, British prime minister
Clement Attlee made the case for a far-reaching “democratic”
approach to international educational cooperation as a method of
world governance, enunciating words that would become part of the
most famous line of the UNESCO Charter: “All of us hope to educate
our people for the world we want to build. Our watchword is
‘educate so that the minds of the people shall be attuned to peace.’ .
. . [W]ars begin in the minds of men. And we are to live in a world
of democracies, where the mind of the common man will be all
important.”13 Meanwhile, the British and American embassies in
Moscow unsuccessfully tried to convince the Soviet People’s
Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (NKID) to do its part in the genesis
of UNESCO, writing a letter to A. Ia. Vyshinskii and following up by
sending their officers to urge NKID “to reconsider their previous
decision and to send a delegation to the conference.”14
The following November, the first session of the UNESCO General
Conference opened under the presidency of former French Prime
Minister Léon Blum. The delegates elected Julian Huxley as
UNESCO’s first director-general and approved a series of programs
designed, in line with the preamble of the agency’s charter, to
construct “the defenses of peace” in the “minds of men.”15 The
international atmosphere of the time made these programs seem all
the more urgent to the conference’s attendees. That spring, the
continued presence of Soviet troops in Iran had sparked the first
major international crisis brought before the new UN Security
Council. In the midst of this crisis, former British prime minister
Winston Churchill had raised tensions further, delivering his famous
“Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri.16 But UNESCO still
harbored hope that the USSR would join its ranks, kindled by the
words of some Soviet emissaries. At the founding conference of the
WHO (World Health Organization) that summer in New York, the
Ukrainian delegate proposed that all educational issues concerning
public health fall under the purview of UNESCO. Over dinner with the
UNESCO observer to the UN, Valere Darchambeau, Soviet delegates
to the WHO conference claimed that the USSR would soon “step in”
to UNESCO. “We assume,” Darchambeau reasoned, “that this
indication could not be given to us without something being decided
on this subject.”17 Two months after the closing of the conference,
however, higher-ranking Soviet officials contradicted this statement.
In a meeting in February 1947, Director-General Huxley urged the
Soviet representative to the UN, A. A. Gromyko, to convince his
government to reconsider its eschewal of UNESCO. Gromyko
repeated Gusev’s assertion that all UN specialized agencies had to
result from the deliberations of ECOSOC. “UNESCO,” he claimed,
“was established contrary to the stipulations of the [UN] Charter at
the initiative of the British and American governments without taking
into account the protest of the USSR.” When Huxley challenged his
assertion that all such organizations had to originate in ECOSOC,
Gromyko replied that, “in general, the USSR does not participate in
the work of specialized institutions that it had not helped to create.”
At the same time, the Soviet diplomat promised to “reflect” on
Huxley’s remarks and requested documents about the international
organization.18
Thus the United States, the United Kingdom, and European
governments exiled in London during the war provided the officials
and intellectuals who laid the foundation for UNESCO with very little
input from the USSR. Apart from Yugoslavia and three countries that
would soon undergo socialist takeovers (Hungary, Poland, and
Czechoslovakia), the majority of non-Western nations involved in
CAME and the first session of the UNESCO General Conference either
fell within the spheres of influence of Western European states or
would align with the West as tensions escalated between the
capitalist and socialist worlds in the coming years.19 The absence of
the USSR from UNESCO reveals the drastic differences and subtle
similarities between how Stalin and UNESCO’s founders understood
world order and the use of knowledge to transform that order at the
start of the Cold War.
 During the Second World War and after, Stalin made clear his
preference for great-power diplomacy over more democratic forms
of world governance. As indicated by the Soviet observer to CAME,
the USSR had deep reservations about the power UNESCO gave to
“small states.” In the wartime summits that would culminate in the
birth of the UN in San Francisco, Soviet dignitaries clearly favored
limiting the world body’s portfolio to security-related matters and the
preservation of peace between the victorious allies in the spirit of
nineteenth-century congresses among the great powers of Europe.
At the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in the fall of 1944, the USSR
relented to pressure from the United States and the United Kingdom
on this issue, begrudgingly allowing for the formation of ECOSOC,
which would oversee a constellation of new specialized agencies.
Whereas the Soviet Union had managed to safeguard its power to
veto any resolution in the Security Council, other UN organs,
including UNESCO, operated on the basis of majority rule and
granted equal suffrage to all states, thereby leaving the USSR with
no means of quashing undesirable programs.20
UNESCO’s specialization in areas fundamental to the Soviet
project–information, knowledge, and culture–meant that its
democratic brand of world governance posed a unique threat to the
hegemony of the Soviet state at home. More generally, in the 1940s,
Soviet officials viewed multilateral exchange among nations as a
zero-sum game for domination rather than cooperation for mutual
benefit. In the case of the financial institutions of the Bretton Woods
system, for instance, historian Vladislav Zubok points to several
motives behind the Soviet determination to forgo participation,
including a disinclination to become indebted to foreign nations as
well as a fear of “economic and financial penetration” due to what
Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov described decades later as the fear
that the Americans would “draw” the USSR into their “company” but
in a “subordinate role.”21 In light of Western domination of UNESCO,
Soviet leaders must have likewise worried about the prospect of
having to conform to the dictates of a potentially hostile majority of
member states intent on the “penetration” of Soviet cultural and
educational institutions. Proposals introduced at the organization’s
first general conference—including the “study” of constructing a
“worldwide radio network” and a “comprehensive revision of
textbooks and related teaching materials”—likely reinforced Soviet
fears.22
Moreover, the hope, no matter how far-fetched, that UNESCO and
the UN system in general might lay the basis for more maximalist
forms of world governance posed a direct threat to Soviet
sovereignty. The Soviet state under Stalin understood that such
hopes had particular resonance in the postwar moment in the West.
Glenda Sluga has designated this moment, which lasted for much of
the 1940s, as the “apogee of internationalism,” during which “ ‘world
government’ was a rhetorical commonplace” in Western public
discourse, while “cosmopolitanism . . . in its literal translation ‘world
citizenship’ ” became a virtuous buzzword among the educated
public.23 Since UNESCO functioned as the primary intergovernmental
body engaged in instilling in the world’s population “international
understanding,” it brimmed with members of the Western
intelligentsia who ascribed to such utopian ideas and viewed the
organization as the seed of more radical global integration. For some
of UNESCO’s founders, global political centralization stood as a
distant aim of the organization’s activities. Huxley, as its first
director-general, conceived of the organization as a mechanism to
cultivate a global corpus of knowledge that would pave the way for
global integration under a single political entity. In UNESCO: Its
Purpose and Its Philosophy, he declared its “general philosophy”
should “be a scientific world humanism, global in extent and
evolutionary in background.” Just as Otlet had based his call for
world government on a perceived worldwide trend toward global
intellectual integration, so too did Huxley pin his hopes for a future
world government on the universalization of knowledge. Depicting
world history as on a trajectory toward the unification of knowledge
through exchange, Huxley maintained that UNESCO should help
aggregate from the nations of the world a “unified pool of tradition,”
particularly in the sphere of science. By doing so, it would lay the
foundation for a future global community and “must envisage some
form of world political unity, whether through a single world
government or otherwise, as the only certain means for avoiding
war.” While such “world political unity” remained a “remote ideal,”
Huxley cautioned, UNESCO could “do a great deal to lay the
foundations on which world political unity can later be built.” This
included highlighting in its “educational program” the “ultimate
need” for such unity and working to “familiarize all peoples with the
implications of the transfer of full sovereignty from separate nations
to a world organization.”24
The few socialist delegates to UNESCO intimated that the USSR’s
hostility to the organization derived in part from an animosity toward
Huxley’s promises of utopia through world governance. At the first
general conference, the Yugoslav delegate, M. V. Ribnikar,
expounded on the misgivings of Soviet loyalists about UNESCO’s
aspirations for global integration. “UNESCO,” Ribnikar quipped, “has
even elaborated its own philosophy, labeled ‘World Scientific
Humanism,’ which according to the program, will be forcibly
disseminated to and imposed upon the peoples of the world.”
Castigating proposals for UNESCO’s first program for their “persistent
tendency” toward a “casting of the various national cultures in a
standard mould,” he dismissed Huxley’s philosophy as “a kind of
philosophic Esperanto” and expressed opposition to “any attempt to
create any kind of cultural centralization.” UNESCO’s potential
embrace of Huxley’s philosophy and rejection of dialectical
materialism, he feared, “would lead to the enslavement of thought
and the spirit of creation” while “subjecting science to metaphysics.”2
5

Inside the USSR, such pie-in-the-sky discussions of world

governance served as fodder for Soviet propagandists eager to
highlight the threat from the West. In his “two camps” speech to the
Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) in September 1947 on
the mounting hostility between the capitalist and socialist blocs, A.
A. Zhdanov portrayed supporters of a future world government as
putting a universalist gloss on Western conspiracies for global
domination. “One of the directions taken by the ideological
‘campaign’ which accompanies the plan for enslaving Europe,”
Zhdanov declared, “is an attack on the principle of national
sovereignty, a call to reject the sovereign rights of peoples,
counterposing to them the idea of ‘world government.’ ” This
aspiration, which “bourgeois intellectuals from among the dreamers
and pacifists” had “seized on,” was “used not only as a means of
pressure for the ideological disarmament of peoples who are
defending their independence from encroachments by American
imperialism, but also as a slogan specially directed against the Soviet
Union.”26
As the Cold War escalated, the utopia of a post-national world,
reframed in this way as the dystopia of Western domination, also
shaped the language of Stalin’s anti-Semitic attacks on the Soviet
intelligentsia. At the height of the “anticosmopolitan campaign” of
the late 1940s, an article in Pravda, “Cosmopolitanism—the
Ideological Weapon of American Reaction,” again referred to the
aspiration for one world as antithetical to Soviet ideological and
cultural purity. “The word ‘cosmopolitan’ translated from Greek
means world citizen,” the author of the article expounded.
“Cosmopolitanism is the preaching of so-called ‘world citizenship,’ the
rejection of affiliation with any nation, the elimination of national
traditions and cultures of peoples under the pretext of creating a
‘world,’ ‘universal,’ culture.” As an example of this “expanding” trend
in “the bourgeois states of Europe,” the writer derisively recounted a
recent meeting in England of “ ‘scholars and philosophers’ ” who
dismissed “all patriotism” as “ ‘idolatry.’ ”27
The campaigns kicked off by these pronouncements accelerated
an ongoing retrenchment in the Soviet Union that placed knowledge
in the service of the communist project and its global struggle in the
new Cold War. If UNESCO sought to harness knowledge to remake
“the minds of men” for peace, the Soviet state in the postwar period
attempted to radically revise knowledge to transform its own
people’s consciousness. Even before Zhdanov’s “two camps” speech,
Stalin had started to rebuild the Soviet ideological “fortress,”
denouncing members of the Soviet elite perceived as “kowtowing” or
showing “servility” before the West.28 As historian Ethan Pollock has
detailed, the Soviet academy witnessed in these early postwar years
a series of debates on history, philosophy, science, and linguistics
into which Stalin intervened as the “coryphaeus of science,”
conducting a “chorus” of scholars who served on the “philosophical
front” of the Cold War. Over time, these “open discussions” resulted
in the retrofitting of Soviet scholarship and knowledge to conform to
the postwar propaganda needs of the Soviet state.29
The triumph of the spurious theories of Soviet geneticist T. D.
Lysenko represented the most extreme example of this
weaponization of knowledge.30 The Soviet pseudoscientist’s claims
to have upended the basic laws of biology both mimicked and made
a mockery of UNESCO’s project to use knowledge to transform the
world. Just as Ribnikar had accused UNESCO of “subjecting science
to metaphysics,” the international organization’s architects
condemned the so-called “Lysenko Affair” as the perversion of
science in the service of ideology. After Huxley resigned from his
post as head of UNESCO, he became an outspoken critic of
Lysenko’s digressions from scientific consensus. Having previously
expressed admiration for the scientific rationality of Soviet state
planning, Huxley denounced what he regarded as the USSR’s
betrayal of the universality of science in his 1949 book, Soviet
Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity.31
The mutual animosity between UNESCO and the USSR derived
from their competing aspirations to instrumentalize knowledge for
their respective political projects. Both lamented the other’s
“subjecting” of science to projects aiming to transform
consciousness. On the one hand, the Soviet state under Stalin
rejected UNESCO’s utopian claim that it acted as an agent of a
better future through intellectual exchange, accusing it instead of
using such exchange as a means of domination. On the other hand,
Soviet officials weaponized knowledge to remake the “minds of men”
within their borders, drawing the ire of UNESCO officials for
engaging in the revision of knowledge to serve the communist
project.
The Soviet usage of the term “cosmopolitan” as an epithet
therefore reflects the intense antagonism engendered by the two
projects’ similarities as much as their differences. Viewed in an
international context, accusations of “cosmopolitanism” in the late-
Stalinist war on the intelligentsia carried weight because of the
fascination in the West with the “one-world” promise and Soviet
anxieties over the threat this promise posed to their own utopian
project. As the principal noncommunist internationalist institution in
the contested areas of education, science, and culture, UNESCO
stood out as the ultimate achievement of the “dreamers and
pacifists” whom the Soviet state viewed as little more than
apologists for Western imperialism but nevertheless feared as
competitors for the mantle of champions for a better world.

UNESCO through the Cold War

Regardless of how the USSR viewed UNESCO, the international
organization did its best to ignore the seemingly inexorable march
toward a new war between the capitalist and socialist blocs,
concentrating its resources on projects perceived as “above” politics
and in the supposedly “universal” realms of education, science, and
culture. In 1947, its first year of full operations, UNESCO launched
plans for the Hylean-Amazon Institute in Brazil; initiated three “pilot
projects” on “fundamental education” in Haiti, China, and British East
Africa; and sponsored research on “international understanding.”32
Yet as optimism about the possibility of a lasting peace degenerated
into alarm over the threat of a new world war, UNESCO dipped its
toes into more contentious issues. In particular, the agency
collaborated with Western governments in the reconstruction of the
so-called “ex-enemy” nations.
In the case of Germany, UNESCO proceeded cautiously due to the
raw feelings harbored by many of its member states toward the
former Axis power. The first session of the general conference
passed a resolution proposed by the Dutch delegate that authorized
the organization to explore measures aimed at the country’s
“reeducation.”33 Over the ensuing months, UNESCO sent its officials
to the Western zones of the defeated power with the mission of
ascertaining the best ways to reintegrate it into the international
community and refashion its political culture.34 Encouraged by the
favorable assessments transmitted by his colleagues on the ground,
Director-General Huxley notified the American, British, and French
governments in January 1947 that he intended to broach the subject
of UNESCO’s formal entry into Germany with the Allied Control
Authority overseeing occupation of the country.35 While the British
and American governments welcomed this move, the French
expressed apprehension that the USSR might respond to this
overture negatively. “Their fear,” an assistant to the director-general
wrote in April, “is that agreement on their part to UNESCO’s entry
into the French zone of occupation, even though accompanied by
similar activity in the British and American zones, might antagonize
the Soviet authorities.” The French government therefore wanted a
“quadripartite” rather than a “tripartite” process.36
At first, the French got their wish. That spring, the Soviet,
American, British, and French members of a branch of the Allied
Control Authority unanimously recommended that the Authority
begin discussions with UNESCO about possible assistance to
Germany.37 Soon after the adoption of this recommendation,
however, the situation in Europe took a turn for the worse. In June
1947, Secretary of State George Marshall announced an economic
plan to consolidate Western Europe into a prosperous region
immune to the spread of communism. The USSR interpreted this
“European Recovery Program” as little more than a plot to “encircle”
them economically. Then, in September, Zhdanov gave his “two
camps” speech, putting yet another nail in the coffin of the former
Grand Alliance.38 In the midst of this deterioration in relations
between the superpowers, UNESCO dispatched another intermediary
to Germany for further investigation. That fall, the second session of
the UNESCO General Conference, held in Mexico City, also voted to
endorse UNESCO’s entry into negotiations with the Allied Control
Authority.39 But in early 1948, the UNESCO leadership realized that it
risked entangling the organization in the Cold War if it persevered in
establishing itself on the frontlines of the conflict. “The situation in
Germany,” Huxley wrote in January, “is now so delicate that we are
anxious to consider every step most carefully.”40 Days later, the
Allied Control Authority notified UNESCO that it was “unable to agree
to enter into negotiations,” thereby breaking off its nearly yearlong
relationship with the UN agency.41 According to advisers to the
British military governor, the authority’s refusal to negotiate “was of
course the consequence of Soviet obstructive tactics in the
coordinating committee, where the Soviet representative took the
line that UNESCO activity in Germany was ‘premature.’ ” The Western
occupying forces, they argued, should react to this behavior by
advertising themselves as “promoting and encouraging UNESCO in
its desire to function in Germany (and by contrast that it should be
equally well known that it is the Russians who are trying to block
this).”42
Undeterred by this rejection, Huxley penned separate letters to
the British, French, American, and Soviet military governments
without alerting the UNESCO Executive Board, effectively
circumventing the Allied Control Authority.43 After the heads of the
Western zones agreed in their responses to leave out their Soviet
counterpart and correspond with UNESCO independently, the
executive board held an extraordinary session in April to consider its
options. In a report prepared for the session, Walter Laves, the
American UNESCO deputy director-general, described his meetings
with the military chiefs in the three Western zones and assured the
board that these authorities wanted to team up with UNESCO. “The
time has come for UNESCO to move as rapidly, judiciously and
circumspectly as possible toward helping in reeducating the German
people so that they may participate once more in international
society,” he asserted. “That time,” he warned, “is running short. . . .
The potential threat to peace continues in Germany unless the
United Nations can be successful in this task. The threat is not only
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make visits; but such absences may not exceed three months in
each respective year. . . .”
“What provision was made in case one of them should marry?”
asked the Inspector.
“None. Even marriage on the part of any of the legatees did not
vitiate the restrictions of the will. If a Greene married, he or she had
to live out the twenty-five years on the estate just the same. The
husband or wife could share the residence, of course. In event of
children the will provided for the erection of two other small dwellings
on the 52d Street side of the lot. Only one exception was made to
these stipulations. If Ada should marry, she could live elsewhere
without losing her inheritance, as she apparently was not Tobias’s
own child and could not, therefore, carry on the blood line of the
Greenes.”
“What penalties attached to a breaking of the domiciliary terms of
the will?” Again the Inspector put the question.
“Only one penalty—disinheritance, complete and absolute.”
“A rigid old bird,” murmured Vance. “But the important thing about
the will is, I should say, the manner in which he left the money. How
was this distributed?”
“It wasn’t distributed. With the exception of a few minor bequests,
it was left in its entirety to the widow. She was to have the use of it
during her lifetime, and could, at her death, dispose of it to the
children—and grandchildren, if any—as she saw fit. It was
imperative, however, that it all remain in the family.”
“Where do the present generation of Greenes get their living
expenses? Are they dependent on the old lady’s bounty?”
“Not exactly. A provision was made for them in this way: each of
the five children was to receive from the executors a stipulated
amount from Mrs. Greene’s income, sufficient for personal needs.”
Markham folded up the paper. “And that about covers Tobias’s will.”
“You spoke of a few minor bequests,” said Vance. “What were
they?”
“Sproot was left a competency, for instance—enough to take care
of him comfortably whenever he wished to retire from service. Mrs.
Mannheim, also, was to receive an income for life beginning at the
end of the twenty-five years.”
 “Ah! Now, that’s most interestin’. And in the meantime she could,
if she chose, remain as cook at a liberal salary.”
“Yes, that was the arrangement.”
“The status of Frau Mannheim fascinates me. I have a feeling
that some day ere long she and I will have a heart-to-heart talk.—
Any other minor bequests?”
“A hospital, where Tobias recovered from typhus fever contracted
in the tropics; and a donation to the chair of criminology at the
University of Prague. I might mention too, as a curious item, that
Tobias left his library to the New York Police Department, to be
turned over to them at the expiration of the twenty-five years.”
Vance drew himself up with puzzled interest.
“Amazin’!”
Heath had turned to the Inspector.
“Did you know anything about this, sir?”
“It seems to me I’ve heard of it. But a gift of books a quarter of a
century in the future isn’t apt to excite the officials of the force.”
Vance, to all appearances, was smoking with indolent unconcern;
but the precise way he held his cigarette told me that some unusual
speculation was absorbing his mind.
“The will of Mrs. Greene,” Markham went on, “touches more
definitely on present conditions, though personally I see nothing
helpful in it. She has been mathematically impartial in doling out the
estate. The five children—Julia, Chester, Sibella, Rex, and Ada—
receive equal amounts under its terms—that is, each gets a fifth of
the entire estate.”
“That part of it don’t interest me,” put in the Sergeant. “What I
want to know is, who gets all this money in case the others pass
outa the picture?”
“The provision covering that point is quite simple,” explained
Markham. “Should any of the children die before a new will is drawn,
their share of the inheritance is distributed equally among the
remaining beneficiaries.”
“Then when any one of ’em passes out, all the others benefit.
And if all of ’em, except one, should die, that one would get
everything—huh?”
“Yes.”
 “So, as it stands now, Sibella and Ada would get everything—
fifty-fifty—provided the old lady croaked.”
“That’s correct, Sergeant.”
“But suppose both Sibella and Ada, as well as the old lady,
should die: what would become of the money?”
“If either of the girls had a husband, the estate would pass to him.
But, in event of Sibella and Ada dying single, everything would go to
the State. That is to say, the State would get it provided there were
no relatives alive—which I believe is the case.”
Heath pondered these possibilities for several minutes.
“I can’t see anything in the situation to give us a lead,” he
lamented. “Everybody benefits equally by what’s already happened.
And there’s three of the family still left—the old lady and the two
girls.”
“Two from three leaves one, Sergeant,” suggested Vance quietly.
“What do you mean by that, sir?”
“The morphine and the strychnine.”
Heath gave a start and made an ugly face.
“By God!” He struck the table with his fist. “It ain’t coming to that if
I can stop it!” Then a sense of helplessness tempered his outraged
resolution, and he became sullen.
“I know how you feel.” Vance spoke with troubled
discouragement. “But I’m afraid we’ll all have to wait. If the Greene
millions are an actuating force in this affair, there’s no way on earth
to avert at least one more tragedy.”
“We might put the matter up to the two girls and perhaps induce
them to separate and go away,” ventured the Inspector.
“That would only postpone the inevitable,” Vance returned. “And
besides, it would rob them of their patrimony.”
“A court ruling might be obtained upsetting the provisions of the
will,” submitted Markham dubiously.
Vance gave him an ironical smile.
“By the time you could get one of your beloved courts to act the
murderer would have had time to wipe out the entire local judiciary.”
For nearly two hours ways and means of dealing with the case
were discussed; but obstacles confronted nearly every line of activity
advocated. Finally it was agreed that the only practicable tactics to
be pursued were those of the routine police procedure. However,
before the conference broke up, certain specific decisions had been
taken. The guard about the Greene estate was to be increased, and
a man was to be placed on the upper floor of the Narcoss Flats to
keep a close watch on the front door and windows. On some pretext
or other a detective was to be kept inside of the house as many
hours as possible during the day; and the telephone-line of the
Greenes was to be tapped.
Vance insisted, somewhat against Markham’s inclination, that
every one in the house and every person who called there—however
seemingly remote his connection with the case—should be regarded
as a suspect and watched vigilantly; and Heath was ordered by the
Inspector to convey this decision to O’Brien, lest her instinctive
partiality should result in the relaxation of her scrutiny of certain
persons. The Sergeant, it seemed, had already instituted a thorough
investigation into the private affairs of Julia, Chester, and Rex; and a
dozen men were at work on their associates and activities outside of
the Greene mansion, with special instructions to gather reports of
conversations which might have contained some hint or reference
indicating a foreknowledge or suspicion of the crimes.
Just as Markham rose to terminate the discussion Vance again
leaned forward and spoke.
“In case there is to be a poisoning we should, I think, be
prepared. Where overdoses of either morphine or strychnine are
administered immediate action will sometimes save the victim. I
would suggest that an official physician be placed in the Narcoss
Flats with the man set to watch the Greene windows; and he should
have at hand all the necess’ry apparatus and antidotes used in
combating morphine and strychnine poisoning. Furthermore, I would
suggest that we arrange some sort of signal with Sproot and the new
nurse, so that, should anything happen, our doctor can be
summoned without a moment’s delay. If the victim of the attempted
poisoning were saved, we might be able to ascertain who
administered the drug.”
The plan was readily agreed to. The Inspector took it upon
himself to arrange the matter that night with one of the official police
surgeons; and Heath went at once to the Narcoss Flats to secure a
room facing the Greene mansion.
 CHAPTER XVIII.
In the Locked Library
(Wednesday, December 1; 1 p. m.)

Vance, contrary to his custom, rose early the next morning. He

was rather waspish, and I left him severely alone. He made several
desultory attempts at reading, and once, when he put his book down,
I glanced at the title,—he had chosen a life of Genghis Khan! Later in
the forenoon he attempted to busy himself with cataloguing his
Chinese prints.
We were to have lunch with Markham at the Lawyers Club at one
o’clock, and at a little after twelve Vance ordered his powerful
Hispano-Suiza. He always drove himself when engaged on a
problem: the activity seemed to steady his nerves and clarify his
brain.
Markham was waiting for us, and it was only too plain from his
expression that something of a disturbing nature had occurred.
“Unburden, old dear,” invited Vance, when we were seated at our
table in a corner of the main dining-room. “You look as serious as
Saint John of Patmos. I’m sure something wholly to be expected has
happened. Have the galoshes disappeared?”
Markham looked at him with some wonder.
“Yes! The O’Brien woman called the Bureau at nine o’clock this
morning and reported that they had been removed from the linen-
closet during the night. They were there, however, when she went to
bed.”
“And, of course, they have not been found.”
“No. She made a pretty careful search before phoning.”
“Fancy that. But she might have saved herself the trouble.—What
does the doughty Sergeant opine?”
 “Heath reached the house before ten o’clock, and made an
investigation. But he learned nothing. No one admitted hearing any
sound in the hall during the night. He re-searched the house himself,
but without result.”
“Have you heard from Von Blon this morning?”
“No; but Heath saw him. He came to the house about ten and
stayed nearly an hour. He appeared very much upset over the stolen
drugs, and immediately asked if any trace of them had been found.
He spent most of the hour with Sibella.”
“Ah, welladay! Let us enjoy our truffes gastronome without the
intrusion of unpleasant speculations. This Madeira sauce, by the by,
is very good.” Thus Vance dismissed the subject.
However, that luncheon was to prove a memorable one; for
toward the end of the meal Vance made a suggestion—or, rather,
insisted upon an action—that was eventually to solve and explain the
terrible tragedies at the Greene mansion. We had reached our
dessert when, after a long silence, he looked up at Markham and
said:
“The Pandora complex has seized and mastered me. I simply
must get into Tobias’s locked library. That sacred adytum has begun
to infest my slumbers; and ever since you mentioned the legacy of
those books I’ve had no rest. I yearn to become acquainted with
Tobias’s literary taste, and to learn why he should have selected the
police for his beneficiaries.”
“But, my dear Vance, what possible connection——?”
“Desist! You can’t think of a question I have not already put to
myself; and I’m unable to answer any of them. But the fact remains, I
must inspect that library even if you have to get a judicial order to
batter down the door. There are sinister undercurrents in that old
house, Markham; and a hint or two may be found in that secret
room.”
“It will be a difficult proceeding if Mrs. Greene stands firm on her
refusal to deliver the key to us.” Markham, I could see, had already
acquiesced. He was in a mood to accede to any suggestion that
even remotely promised a clarification of the problem posed by the
Greene murders.
 It was nearly three o’clock when we reached the house. Heath
had already arrived, in answer to a telephone call from Markham;
and we at once presented ourselves to Mrs. Greene. Following an
ocular sign from the Sergeant the new nurse left the room; and
Markham went directly to the point. The old lady had eyed us
suspiciously as we came in, and now sat rigidly against her pile of
pillows, her gaze fixed on Markham with defensive animosity.
“Madam,” he began, somewhat severely, “we regret the necessity
of this call. But certain things have arisen which make it imperative
that we visit Mr. Greene’s library. . . .”
“You sha’n’t!” she broke in, her voice rising in an infuriated
crescendo. “You sha’n’t put your foot in that room! Not for twelve
years has any one passed the threshold, and no policeman now
shall desecrate the place where my husband spent the last years of
his life.”
“I appreciate the sentiment that actuates your refusal,” replied
Markham; “but graver considerations have intervened. The room will
have to be searched.”
“Not if you kill me!” she cried. “How dare you force your way into
my house——?”
Markham held up his hand authoritatively.
“I am not here to argue the matter. I came to you merely to ask
for the key. Of course, if you prefer to have us break down the
door. . . .” He drew a sheaf of papers from his pocket. “I have
secured a search-warrant for that room; and it would cause me deep
regret to have to serve it on you.” (I was amazed at his aggressive
daring, for I knew he had no warrant.)
Mrs. Greene broke forth with imprecations. Her anger became
almost insensate, and she was changed into a creature at once
repulsive and pitiful. Markham waited calmly for her paroxysm of fury
to pass; and when, her vituperation spent, she beheld his quiet,
inexorable bearing, she knew that she had lost. She sank back,
white and exhausted.
“Take the key,” she capitulated bitterly, “and save me the final
infamy of having my house torn down by ruffians. . . . It’s in the ivory
jewel-case in the top drawer of that cabinet.” She pointed weakly to
the lacquered high-boy.
 Vance crossed the room and secured the key—a long, old-
fashioned instrument with a double bit and a filigreed bow.
“Have you always kept the key in this jewel-case, Mrs. Greene?”
he asked, as he closed the drawer.
“For twelve years,” she whined. “And now, after all that time, it is
to be taken from me by force—and by the police, the very people
who should be protecting an old, helpless paralytic like me. It’s
infamy! But what can I expect? Every one takes delight in torturing
me.”
Markham, his object gained, became contrite, and endeavored to
pacify her by explaining the seriousness of the situation. But in this
he failed; and a few moments later he joined us in the hall.
“I don’t like this sort of thing, Vance,” he said.
“You did remarkably well, however. If I hadn’t been with you since
lunch I’d have believed you really had a search-warrant. You are a
veritable Machiavelli. Te saluto!”
“Get on with your business, now that you have the key,” ordered
Markham irritably. And we descended to the main hall.
Vance looked about him cautiously to make sure we were not
observed, and led the way to the library.
“The lock works rather easily, considering its twelve years of
desuetude,” he remarked, as he turned the key and gently pushed
open the massive oak door. “And the hinges don’t even creak.
Astonishin’.”
Blackness confronted us, and Vance struck a match.
“Please don’t touch anything,” he admonished, and, holding the
match high before him, he crossed to the heavy velour draperies of
the east window. As he drew them apart a cloud of dust filled the air.
“These curtains, at least, have not been touched for years,” he
said.
The gray light of mid-afternoon suffused the room, revealing an
astonishing retreat. The walls were lined with open book-shelves
which reached from the floor nearly to the ceiling, leaving only space
enough for a row of marble busts and squat bronze vases. At the
southern end of the room was a massive flat-topped desk, and in the
centre stood a long carved table laden with curious and outlandish
ornaments. Beneath the windows and in the corners were piles of
pamphlets and portfolios; and along the moulding of the bookcases
hung gargoyles and old prints yellow with age. Two enormous
Persian lamps of perforated brass depended from the ceiling, and
beside the centre-table stood a Chinese sconce eight feet high. The
floor was covered with overlapping Oriental rugs laid at all angles;
and at each end of the fireplace was a hideous, painted totem-pole
reaching to the beams. A thick coating of dust overlay everything.
Vance returned to the door and, striking another match, closely
examined the inner knob.
“Some one,” he announced, “has been here recently. There’s no
sign of dust on this knob.”
“We might get the finger-prints,” suggested Heath.
Vance shook his head.
“Not even worth trying. The person we’re dealing with knows
better than to leave sign manuals.”
He closed the door softly and threw the bolt. Then he looked
about him. Presently he pointed beneath a huge geographical globe
beside the desk.
“There are your galoshes, Sergeant. I thought they’d be here.”
Heath almost threw himself upon them, and carried them to the
window.
“They’re the ones, all right,” he declared.
Markham gave Vance one of his annoyed, calculating stares.
“You’ve got some theory,” he asserted, in an accusing tone.
“Nothing more than I’ve already told you. The finding of the
galoshes was wholly incidental. I’m interested in other things—just
what, I don’t know.”
He stood near the centre-table and let his eyes roam over the
objects of the room. Presently his gaze came to rest on a low wicker
reading-chair the right arm of which was shaped into a book-rest. It
stood within a few feet of the wall opposite to the fireplace, facing a
narrow section of book-shelves that was surmounted by a replica of
the Capitoline Museum bust of Vespasian.
“Most untidy,” he murmured. “I’m sure that chair wasn’t left in that
position twelve years ago.”
He moved forward, and stood looking down at it musingly.
Instinctively Markham and Heath followed him; and then they saw
the thing that he had been contemplating. On the table-arm of the
chair was a deep saucer in which stood the thick stub of a candle.
The saucer was almost filled with smoky wax drippings.
“It took many candles to fill that dish,” commented Vance; “and I
doubt if the departed Tobias did his reading by candle-light.” He
touched the seat and the back of the chair, and then examined his
hand. “There’s dust, but nowhere near a decade’s accumulation.
Some one has been browsing in this library rather recently; and he
was dashed secretive about it. He didn’t dare draw the shades or
turn on the lights. He sat here with a single candle, sampling
Tobias’s brand of literature. And it apparently appealed to him, for
this one saucer contains evidence of many bookish nights. How
many other saucers of paraffin there were we don’t know.”
“The old lady could tell us who had a chance to put the key back
this morning after hiding the galoshes,” offered Heath.
“No one put the key back this morning, Sergeant. The person
who was in the habit of visiting here wouldn’t have stolen it and
returned it on each occasion when he could have had a duplicate
made in fifteen minutes.”
“I guess you’re right.” The Sergeant was sorely perplexed. “But
as long as we don’t know who’s got the key, we’re no better off than
we were.”
“We’re not quite through yet with our scrutiny of the library,”
rejoined Vance. “As I told Mr. Markham at lunch, my main object in
coming here was to ascertain Tobias’s taste in literature.”
“A lot of good that’ll do you!”
“One never can tell. Tobias, remember, bequeathed his library to
the Police Department. . . . Let’s see with what tomes the old boy
whiled away his inactive hours.”
Vance took out his monocle and, polishing it carefully, fitted it to
his eye. Then he turned to the nearest book-shelves. I stepped
forward and looked over his shoulder; and, as my glance ran over
the dusty titles, I could scarcely suppress an exclamation of
amazement. Here was one of the most complete and unusual private
libraries of criminology in America—and I was familiar with many of
the country’s famous collections. Crime in all its phases and
ramifications was represented. Rare old treatises, long out of print
and now the delight of bibliophiles, shouldered one another in
compact tiers on Tobias Greene’s shelves.
Nor were the subjects of these books limited to a narrow
interpretation of criminology. All the various allied branches of the
subject were represented. There were entire sections devoted to
insanity and cretinism, social and criminal pathology, suicide,
pauperism and philanthropy, prison-reform, prostitution and
morphinism, capital punishment, abnormal psychology, legal codes,
the argot of the underworld and code-writing, toxicology, and police
methods. The volumes were in many languages—English, French,
German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, Dutch, and Latin.20
Vance’s eyes sparkled as he moved along the crowded shelves.
Markham also was deeply interested; and Heath, bending here and
there toward a volume, registered an expression of bewildered
curiosity.
“My word!” murmured Vance. “No wonder your department,
Sergeant, was chosen as the future custodian of these tomes. What
a collection! Extr’ordin’ry!—Aren’t you glad, Markham, you wangled
the old lady into relinquishing the key——?”
Suddenly he stiffened and jerked his head toward the door, at the
same time lifting his hand for silence. I, too, had heard a slight noise
in the hall, like some one brushing against the woodwork of the door,
but had thought nothing of it. For a few moments we waited tensely.
But no further sound came to us, and Vance stepped quickly to the
door and drew it open. The hall was empty. He stood on the
threshold for a while listening. Then he closed the door, and turned
again to the room.
“I could have sworn some one was listening in the hall.”
“I heard a rustle of some kind,” Markham corroborated him. “I
took it for granted it was Sproot or the maid passing by.”
“Why should anybody’s hanging round the hall worry us, Mr.
Vance?” Heath asked.
“I really couldn’t say, don’t y’ know. But it bothers me,
nevertheless. If some one was at the door listening, it shows that our
presence here has produced a state of anxiety in the person privy to
the fact. It’s possible, d’ ye see, that some one is desirous of
ascertaining what we have found out.”
 “Well, I can’t see that we’ve found out enough to make anybody
lose any sleep,” mumbled Heath.
“You’re so discouraging, Sergeant.” Vance sighed and went to the
book-shelves in front of the wicker reading-chair. “There may be
something in this section to cheer us. Let us see if there’s a glad
tiding or two written in the dust.”
He struck match after match as he carefully inspected the tops of
the books, beginning at the highest shelf and systematically
scrutinizing the volumes of each row. He had reached the second
shelf from the floor when he bent over curiously and gave a second
long look at two thick gray volumes. Then, putting out the match, he
took the volumes to the window.
“The thing is quite mad,” he remarked, after a brief examination.
“These are the only books within arm’s reach of the chair that have
been handled recently. And what do you think they are? An old two-
volume edition of Professor Hans Gross’s ‘Handbuch für
Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik,’ or—to claw the
title loosely into the vulgate—‘A Handbook on the Criminal Sciences
for Examining Magistrates.’ ” He gave Markham a look of facetious
reproach. “I say, you haven’t, by any chance, been spending your
nights in this library learning how to ballyrag suspects?”
Markham ignored his levity. He recognized the outward sign of
Vance’s inner uneasiness.
“The apparently irrelevant theme of the book,” he returned, “might
indicate a mere coincidence between the visits of some person to
this room and the crimes committed in the house.”
Vance made no answer. He thoughtfully returned the books to
their place and ran his eye over the remaining volumes of the bottom
shelf. Suddenly he knelt down and struck another match.
“Here are several books out of place.” I detected a subdued note
of eagerness in his voice. “They belong in other sections; and
they’ve been crowded in here a little out of alignment. Moreover,
they’re innocent of dust. . . . ’Pon my soul, Markham, here’s a
coincidence for your sceptical legal mind! Lend an ear to these titles:
‘Poisons: Their Effects and Detection,’ by Alexander Wynter Blyth,21
and ‘Textbook of Medical Jurisprudence, Toxicology, and Public
Health,’ by John Glaister, professor of Forensic Medicine at the
University of Glasgow. And here we have Friedrich Brügelmann’s
‘Über hysterische Dämmerzustände,’ and Schwarzwald’s ‘Über
Hystero-Paralyse und Somnambulismus.’—I say! That’s deuced
queer. . . .”
He rose and walked up and down agitatedly.
“No—no; absolutely not,” he muttered. “It simply can’t be. . . .
Why should Von Blon lie to us about her?”
We all knew what was in his mind. Even Heath sensed it at once,
for, though he did not speak German, the titles of the two German
books—especially the latter—needed no translation to be
understood. Hysteria and twilight sleep! Hysterical paralysis and
somnambulism! The gruesome and terrible implication in these two
titles, and their possible relation to the sinister tragedies of the
Greene mansion, sent a chill of horror over me.
Vance stopped his restless pacing and fixed a grave gaze on
Markham.
“This thing gets deeper and deeper. Something unthinkable is
going on here.—Come, let us get out of this polluted room. It has told
us its gibbering, nightmarish story. And now we will have to interpret
it—find some glimmer of sanity in its black suggestions.—Sergeant,
will you draw the curtains while I straighten these books? We’d best
leave no evidence of our visit.”
 CHAPTER XIX.
Sherry and Paralysis
(Wednesday, December 1; 4.30 p. m.)

When we returned to Mrs. Greene’s room the old lady was

apparently sleeping peacefully and we did not disturb her. Heath
gave the key to Nurse O’Brien with instructions to replace it in the
jewel-case, and we went down-stairs.
Although it was but a little past four o’clock, the early winter
twilight had already descended. Sproot had not yet lighted the
lamps, and the lower hall was in semidarkness. A ghostly
atmosphere pervaded the house. Even the silence was oppressive,
and seemed fraught with the spirit of commination. We went straight
to the hall table where we had thrown our coats, eager to get out into
the open air.
But we were not to shake the depressing influence of the old
mansion so quickly. We had scarcely reached the table when there
came a slight stirring of the portières of the archway opposite to the
drawing-room, and a tense, whispered voice said:
“Mr. Vance—please!”
We turned, startled. There, just inside of the reception-room,
hiding behind the heavy draperies, stood Ada, her face a patch of
ghastly white in the gathering gloom. With one finger placed on her
lips for silence, she beckoned to us; and we stepped softly into the
chill, unused room.
“There’s something I must tell you,” she said, in a half-whisper,
“—something terrible! I was going to telephone you to-day, but I was
afraid. . . .” A fit of trembling seized her.
“Don’t be frightened, Ada,” Vance encouraged her soothingly. “In
a few days all these awful things will be over.—What have you to tell
us?”
She made an effort to draw herself together, and when the tremor
had passed she went on hesitantly.
“Last night—it was long after midnight—I woke, and felt hungry.
So I got up, slipped on a wrap, and stole down-stairs. Cook always
leaves something in the pantry for me. . . .” Again she stopped, and
her haunted eyes searched our faces. “But when I reached the lower
landing of the stairs I heard a soft, shuffling sound in the hall—far
back, near the library door. My heart was in my mouth, but I made
myself look over the banister. And just then—some one struck a
match. . . .”
Her trembling began afresh, and she clutched Vance’s arm with
both hands. I was afraid the girl was going to faint, and I moved
closer to her; but Vance’s voice seemed to steady her.
“Who was it, Ada?”
She caught her breath and looked about her, her face the picture
of deadly fear. Then she leaned forward.
“It was mother! . . . And she was walking!”
The dread significance of this revelation chilled us all into silence.
After a moment a choked whistle escaped Heath; and Markham
threw back his head like a man shaking himself out of an
encroaching spell of hypnosis. It was Vance who first recovered
himself sufficiently to speak.
“Your mother was near the library door?”
“Yes; and it seemed as though she held a key in her hand.”
“Was she carrying anything else?” Vance’s effort at calmness was
only half successful.
“I didn’t notice—I was too terrified.”
“Could she, for instance, have been carrying a pair of galoshes?”
he persisted.
“She might have been. I don’t know. She had on her long Oriental
shawl, and it fell down about her in folds. Maybe under the
shawl. . . . Or she might have put them down when she struck the
match. I only know I saw her—moving slowly . . . there in the
darkness.”
The memory of that unbelievable vision completely took
possession of the girl. Her eyes stared, trance-like, into the
deepening shadows.
Markham cleared his throat nervously.
“You say yourself it was dark in the hall last night, Miss Greene.
Perhaps your fears got the better of you. Are you sure it might not
have been Hemming or the cook?”
She brought her eyes back to Markham with sudden resentment.
“No!” Then her voice took on its former note of terror. “It was
mother. The match was burning close to her face, and there was a
terrible look in her eyes. I was only a few feet from her—looking
straight down on her.”
Her hold on Vance’s arm tightened, and once more her agonized
gaze turned to him.
“Oh, what does it mean? I thought—I thought mother could never
walk again.”
Vance ignored her anguished appeal.
“Tell me this, for it’s very important: did your mother see you?”
“I—don’t know.” Her words were scarcely audible. “I drew back
and ran softly up the stairs. Then I locked myself in my room.”
Vance did not speak at once. He regarded the girl for a moment,
and then gave her a slow, comforting smile.
“And I think your room is the best place for you now,” he said.
“Don’t worry over what you saw; and keep what you have told us to
yourself. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Certain types of paralytics
have been known to walk in their sleep under the stress of shock or
excitement. Anyway, we’ll arrange for the new nurse to sleep in your
room to-night.” And with a friendly pat on her arm he sent her up-
stairs.
After Heath had given Miss O’Brien the necessary instructions we
left the house and walked toward First Avenue.
“Good God, Vance!” said Markham huskily. “We’ve got to move
quickly. That child’s story opens up new and frightful possibilities.”
“Couldn’t you get a commitment for the old woman to some
sanitarium to-morrow, sir?” asked Heath.
“On what grounds? It’s a pathological case, pure and simple. We
haven’t a scrap of evidence.”
“I shouldn’t attempt it, in any event,” interposed Vance. “We
mustn’t be hasty. There are several conclusions to be drawn from
Ada’s story; and if the thing that all of us is thinking should be wrong,
we’d only make matters worse by a false move. We might delay the
slaughter for the time being; but we’d learn nothing. And our only
hope is to find out—some way—what’s at the bottom of this
atrocious business.”
“Yeh? And how are we going to do that, Mr. Vance?” Heath spoke
with despair.
“I don’t know now. But the Greene household is safe for to-night
anyway; and that gives us a little time. I think I’ll have another talk
with Von Blon. Doctors—especially the younger ones—are apt to
give snap diagnoses.”
Heath had hailed a taxicab, and we were headed down-town
along Third Avenue.
“It can certainly do no harm,” agreed Markham. “And it might
bring forth something suggestive. When will you tackle him?”
Vance was gazing out of the window.
“Why not at once?” Suddenly his mood had changed. “Here we
are in the Forties. And tea-time! What could be more opportune?”
He leaned over and gave the chauffeur an order. In a few
minutes the taxicab drew up to the curb before Von Blon’s
brownstone residence.
The doctor received us apprehensively.
“Nothing wrong, I hope?” he asked, trying to read our faces.
“Oh, no,” Vance answered easily. “We were passing and thought
we’d drop in for a dish of tea and a medical chat.”
Von Blon studied him with a slight suspicion.
“Very well. You gentlemen shall have both.” He rang for his man.
“But I can do even better. I’ve some old Amontillado sherry——”
“My word!” Vance bowed ceremoniously and turned to Markham.
“You see how fortune favors her punctual children?”
The wine was brought and carefully decanted.
Vance took up his glass and sipped it. One would have thought,
from his manner, that nothing in the world at that moment was as
important as the quality of the wine.
“Ah, my dear doctor,” he remarked, with some ostentation, “the
blender on the sunny Andalusian slopes unquestionably had many
rare and valuable butts with which to glorify this vintage. There was
little need for the addition of vino dulce that year; but then, the
Spaniards always sweeten their wine, probably because the English
object to the slightest dryness. And it’s the English, you know, who
buy all the best sherries. They have always loved their ‘sherris-sack’;
and many a British bard has immortalized it in song. Ben Jonson
sang its praises, and so did Tom Moore and Byron. But it was
Shakespeare—an ardent lover of sherry himself—who penned the
greatest and most passionate panegyric to it. You remember
Falstaff’s apostrophe?—‘It ascends me into the brain; dries me there
all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors which environ it; makes it
apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable
shapes. . . .’ Sherry, you probably know, doctor, was once regarded
as a cure for gout and other malaises of faulty metabolism.”
He paused and put down his glass.
“I wonder that you haven’t prescribed this delicious sherry for
Mrs. Greene long ago. I’m sure she would serve you with a writ of
confiscation if she knew you had it.”
“The fact is,” Von Blon returned, “I once took her a bottle, and she
gave it to Chester. She doesn’t care for wine. I remember my father’s
telling me she objected violently to her husband’s well-stocked
cellar.”
“Your father died, did he not, before Mrs. Greene became
paralyzed?” Vance asked incuriously.
“Yes—about a year.”
“And was yours the only diagnosis made of her case?”
Von Blon looked at him with an air of gentle surprise.
“Yes. I saw no necessity of calling in any of the bigwigs. The
symptoms were clear-cut and conformed with the anamnesis.
Furthermore, everything since then has confirmed my diagnosis.”
“And yet, doctor”—Vance spoke with great deference
—“something has occurred which, from the layman’s point of view,
tends to cast doubt on the accuracy of that diagnosis. Therefore, I
feel sure you will forgive me when I ask you quite frankly if it would
not be possible to place another, and perhaps less serious,
interpretation on Mrs. Greene’s invalidism.”
Von Blon appeared greatly puzzled.
 “There is,” he said, “not the slightest possibility that Mrs. Greene
is suffering from any disease other than an organic paralysis of both
legs—a paraplegia, in fact, of the entire lower part of the body.”
“If you were to see Mrs. Greene move her legs, what would be
your mental reaction?”
Von Blon stared at him incredulously. Then he forced a laugh.
“My mental reaction? I’d know my liver was out of order, and that
I was having hallucinations.”
“And if you knew your liver was functioning perfectly—then
what?”
“I’d immediately become a devout believer in miracles.”
Vance smiled pleasantly.
“I sincerely hope it won’t come to that. And yet so-called
therapeutic miracles have happened.”
“I’ll admit that medical history is filled with what the uninitiated call
miraculous cures. But there is sound pathology beneath all of them.
In Mrs. Greene’s case, however, I can see no loophole for error. If
she should move her legs, it would contravert all the known laws of
physiology.”
“By the by, doctor”—Vance put the question abruptly—“are you
familiar with Brügelmann’s ‘Über hysterische Dämmerzustände’?”
“No—I can’t say that I am.”
“Or with Schwarzwald’s ‘Über Hystero-Paralyse und
Somnambulismus’?”
Von Blon hesitated, and his eyes were focussed intently like
those of a man who is thinking rapidly.
“I know Schwarzwald, of course,” he answered. “But I’m ignorant
of the particular work you mention. . . .” Slowly a look of amazement
dawned on his face. “Good heavens! You’re not trying to connect the
subjects of these books with Mrs. Greene’s condition, are you?”
“If I were to tell you that both of these books are in the Greene
mansion, what would you say?”
“I’d say their presence is no more relevant to the situation there
than would be a copy of ‘Die Leiden des jungen Werther’ or Heine’s
‘Romanzero.’ ”
“I’m sorry I can’t agree with you,” returned Vance politely. “They
are certainly relevant to our investigation, and I had hoped you might