‘The Civil Aviation Question Is Not a Local One’: The USSR and the Negotiations on Establishing an International Civil Aviation Organization, 1943–1945

: The Second World War laid the groundwork for a new system of international relations in which the United Nations assumed a central coordinating role. Within this framework, the UN became responsible not only for questions of war and peace but also for an expanding spectrum of specialized cooperation—from agriculture to global health. To that end, the member states created a number of specialized agencies, forming the institutional “family” of the United Nations. International civil aviation was among the fields incorporated into this emerging multilateral order. The rapid growth of the aviation industry during the war, the construction of air infrastructure, and the anticipated postwar increase in air traffic generated new opportunities for the Allied powers. The Soviet Union took an active part in the negotiations to elaborate the regulatory framework and establish the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) but ultimately declined to join it upon its creation.

This article examines Moscow’s diplomatic activity in the sphere of multilateral aviation diplomacy between 1943 and 1945. It argues that the Soviet Union sought to participate in postwar civil aviation cooperation but viewed full control over its airspace as a non-negotiable “red line,” which directly contradicted the positions of the United States and the United Kingdom. The inability to reach a compromise—compounded by procedural delays by the U.S., U.K., and Canada in issuing conference invitations and by changes in the composition and agenda of the negotiations unfavorable to the USSR—eventually led Moscow to abstain from joining ICAO.

The study draws on documents from the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation (AVPRF) as well as published collections of U.S. and British diplomatic materials. This archival base allows for a detailed reconstruction of the Soviet logic of decisionmaking and its perception of multilateral diplomacy at the dawn of the UN system. The findings reveal the early contours of the USSR’s approach to international institutions—an approach that would later shape its policy toward other specialized agencies of the United Nations.

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