Victor Malzev Orders East Germany to Yield on Sovereign Status
By Roy Castellano ·
GDR diplomats fought to avoid being listed as a subordinate appendage, but Soviet Ambassador Victor Malzev warned that such vanity threatened the start of the Helsinki consultations.
In Helsinki on November 22, 1972, a group of East German diplomats met with the Soviet Ambassador, Victor Malzev, to argue about the alphabet. According to notes published by the Cold War International History Project from the Wilson Center Digital Archive, the conversation focused on a seemingly trivial detail of the upcoming Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE): the seating arrangement of the delegations.
To a targeting officer, the logic of a map is everything. In diplomacy, the map is often replaced by a seating chart, and the coordinates are determined by which language you use to list the participants. The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was pushing for a specific designation—insisting on "Germany" as the key word for its own name—and advocated for the use of the French alphabet rather than the English one.
French Alphabets and German Names
The tactical objective of the FRG was precise. By utilizing the French alphabet, the Federal Republic (République fédérale d'Allemagne, or RFA) and the Democratic Republic (République démocratique allemande, or RDA) would be grouped together. Specifically, the French ordering would place the GDR seated between Bonn and Washington (États-Unis d'Amérique).
Heinz Oelzner, the GDR's ambassador to Finland, had already voiced a firm "attitude of rejection" toward this arrangement. The East Germans were not merely fighting over a chair; they were fighting for a designation that signaled their status as a sovereign peer, not a subordinate appendage or a contested territory.
However, the Soviet Union viewed the FRG's maneuver with a different kind of coldness. Ambassador Malzev informed the East Germans that the Soviet embassy was "categorically opposed" to any changes in the existing list of state designations. The Soviets were not defending the GDR's pride; they were defending the status quo of the list, challenging any state that would not be listed according to the standard alphabetical order.
Malzev's Warning to Oelzner
There is a specific kind of tension that exists between a satellite state and its patron. The GDR diplomats—Oelzner, Dr. Siegfried Bock, and Hannelore Trinks—were looking for Soviet backing to dig in their heels. Instead, they received a lecture on the risks of being too stubborn.
Malzev warned that the GDR should "avoid endangering the start of the multilateral consultations by insisting on our position." The Soviet ambassador was essentially telling his East German counterparts that their desire for a particular kind of symbolic recognition was a liability to the broader Soviet strategic goal: getting the CSCE talks off the ground.
Malzev's advice was pragmatic, bordering on dismissive. While the GDR wanted to lean on international precedents to legitimize their demands, Malzev shut that door quickly. He noted that it was "not a good idea to refer to the UN proceedings," because at the United Nations, "every state could determine its own designation." To Malzev, the UN was a place where such vanity was permitted; the CSCE was a place where the Soviets intended to manage the outcome.
Avoiding the UN Trap
The notes record a Finnish effort to avoid a public disaster. Matti Tuovinen, the Director of the Political Department in the Finnish Foreign Ministry, had warned Malzev that rejecting the French alphabet could lead to a "confrontation of positions at the very beginning of the consultations, in full view of the general public.
For the Soviets, a public spat over alphabets was an unnecessary distraction. The objective was to maintain the English alphabet as the basis for seating, as it was the existing order, while ensuring the GDR didn't blow the opening of the talks by trying to play a high-stakes game of semantic legitimacy.
The GDR was caught in the middle. They were too small to dictate terms to the Finns and too dependent on the Soviets to ignore Malzev's instructions. The Soviet solution was a piece of classic diplomatic sleight-of-hand: the GDR was encouraged to convince the Finns that the seating arrangement was a mere technicality—a "regulation [that] is solely relevant for the seating arrangement"—and that it would not be applied to the official list of participants.
This distinction allowed the GDR to swallow the bitter pill of the seating chart without admitting a loss of status on the formal record. It was a compromise of convenience, designed to keep the machinery of the conference moving forward regardless of how the East Germans felt about who sat next to whom.
The record concludes with this strategy of persuasion, leaving the actual result of the Finnish response unrecorded in these notes. It remains to be seen if the Finns accepted this distinction or if the "confrontation of positions" that Tuovinen feared materialized once the delegations finally took their seats.