Letter from Frederick H. Boland to Seán Nunan (Dublin)
(Confidential)

In compliance with the local Protocol, I called today on the Soviet Ambassador, Mr. Zaroubin.¹ A stolidly good-humoured man, he met me very courteously in the hall of the imposing Embassy and conducted me to a room obviously reserved for personal visits of this kind. Here we sat facing one another across a small table on which there was nothing but a large box of cigarettes and a tall heavily shaded lamp which, if it didn't conceal a recording microphone, was certainly admirably designed for doing so.

After discursive chat about Moscow, the Russian theatre, Russian opera, and so on, the Ambassador said in his slow guttural, but accurate, English - 'You have much trouble in Ireland with the Partition, huh?' I gave him a brief account of our point of view about Partition to which he listened with apparent sympathy. He seemed by no means ill-informed on the question himself. One of his observations was: 'You have many Irish people in the United States who think the same way. That is very important for you, huh?' He told me with obvious pride that before going to Canada as Ambassador, he had served in the American Division of the Foreign Affairs Commissariat under Mr. Molotov.²

As the conversation progressed, the Ambassador became more chatty. He told me that he had a boy in the Soviet Union studying to be an engineer. He had wanted him to be a diplomat but the boy preferred engineering which was the height of every Soviet boy's ambition. The boy's attitude was that engineers were builders, but diplomats were merely bureaucrats; 'Oh, he is quite right' said the Ambassador genially, adding modestly as an afterthought: 'Myself, I am Construction Engineer'.