Nikolai Novikov

Nikolai Novikov trained as an economist specializing in Turkey at the Leningrad Oriental Institute, graduating in 1930. Foreign trade work took him to Moscow and Tajikistan before he entered postgraduate study. In 1938, the closure of his institute and a shortage of diplomats following Stalin’s purges brought him into the Foreign Commissariat. He had hoped for an academic career and later recalled resisting the appointment. ¹

He headed the Fourth European Department during the war, then became ambassador in Cairo, with additional responsibility for the Greek and Yugoslav governments in exile. He helped prepare the establishment of relations with Syria and Lebanon in 1944. Transferred to Washington late that year, he worked at the embassy before succeeding Andrei Gromyko as ambassador in 1946. ²

His best known document was the report of 27 September 1946 now called the Novikov Telegram. It portrayed American foreign policy as an attempt by powerful business and political interests to secure worldwide supremacy. Overseas bases, military expansion, and economic strength appeared in his analysis as instruments of that ambition. The document also argued that Soviet survival and growing international influence obstructed American plans. ³

Novikov’s public diplomacy was more open to continued cooperation than that report alone suggests. In 1947 he defended the possibility of postwar collaboration and complained in Moscow about bureaucratic obstacles to cultural contacts. Historians Alexander Kubyshkin and Ivan Kurilla, using his personal archive, connect his dismissal that October to disagreements over the interpretation of American policy. After leaving diplomacy at forty-four, he wrote memoirs and books about the United States and worked as a translator. ¹