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THE "third world" of the developing and, for the most part, newly independent nations is, for Communists of all brands and allegiances, both a crucial arena of political competition against the "imperialists" and the center of their hopes for new victories. Yet there are important differences in the way Moscow and Peking view these opportunities. The Soviet leadership believes that the many poor and ambitious countries will, later if not sooner, decide that Communism offers them the best prospects for raising their status in the world. Chinese Communist propaganda, on the other hand, calls for an ever more militant struggle of "national liberation" to expel the "imperialists" from Asia, Africa, and Latin America and to unite the developing countries under Peking's leadership. Thus, in addition to being a principal focus of Communist hopes and efforts, the question of the "correct" policy toward the third world has unleashed deep-set rivalries and antagonisms between and within ruling and nonruling Communist parties alike.

From its founding the United Nations has been a frequent source of puzzlement and embarrassment to Soviet policy makers. Given the reticence of Soviet statesmen, past and present, and the inaccessibility of Soviet diplomatic archives, we can only speculate about the expectations which were in the minds of Premier Joseph Stalin and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov when they gave their approval to the Moscow Four-Nation Declaration on General Security of October 1943, the first great-power commitment to the establishment of a new international organization. For United States policy makers, certainly, this unprecedented commitment, buttressed by the Vandenberg Resolution, marked an important change in their nation's perspective and purpose. It represented a new determination, even if a vaguely defined one, to cooperate with other nations in establishing and maintaining a better foundation for international peace and order. For the Soviet leaders, who were celebrating the grim liberation of Kiev in the midst of the Moscow Conference, there was probably little time, and certainly no leisure, to speculate about the possible congruence or incongruence of Soviet ambitions with the stabilizing and even static assumptions that underlay a revived and expanded peacekeeping league of states.

How the Soviet citizen views the world, and how he will view it five or ten years from now, is a crucial question. It may determine whether we, and all people, can live in relative peace on this planet, or whether mankind will end up making our globe more or less uninhabitable. The new weapons which science and technology have provided make it all the more urgent to understand the thoughts and purposes of a people and its leaders who wield such great power.