Moscow’s Man at the United Nations
Izabella Tabarovsky
Tablet, September 18, 2026. Read the full essay here.
It’s hard to imagine it today, but there was a moment during the Cold War when a Jew nearly headed the United Nations. It happened in 1971—the year of behind-the-scenes maneuvering to select the next secretary-general—and the man was the 47-year-old Finnish ambassador to the United Nations, Max Jakobson. The son of a Finnish Jewish father and a mother who had converted to Judaism, Jakobson began his career as a journalist, working for the BBC before joining Finland’s foreign service. He was widely regarded as “one of the ablest men” at the United Nations: an experienced diplomat “with a cool head and good nerves.” African states appreciated his firm anti-colonialist stance. He was an American and British favorite, and France’s only complaint against him was that he didn’t speak French. For much of that year, he was considered the front-runner.
His chief rival was 52-year-old Kurt Waldheim, Austria’s former foreign minister and now the country’s permanent representative at the United Nations. A chairman of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, he was typically mentioned alongside a slew of other long-shot candidates. Journalists had a hard time finding anything distinct to say about him: He told them his favorite hobby was work and that he believed the United Nations should be used as an instrument of peace. He was like so many other diplomats who filled the halls of the United Nations—a man with a “correct and colorless record.”
He also had the backing of the Soviet Union.
The 1971 secretary-general selection was the first since the 1967 Six-Day War, which marked a major defeat for the Soviet Union in the Middle East. Israel’s victory over the USSR’s Arab allies was a turning point in the Soviet attitude toward the Jewish state and Zionism. Moscow was always hostile, but after 1967, as Soviet Jews began to demand the right to emigrate, it painted Zionism as a threat to its interests everywhere. But that was also a period of rising Soviet influence inside the United Nations, as former colonies became member states in the 1960s; a position that the Soviets wanted to consolidate.
By November, Waldheim was neck and neck with Jakobson, as the USSR repeatedly vetoed the Finnish candidate in the Security Council. Two days before Christmas, the United Nations officially made its pick: The Austrian representative became its new head. When the initial shock subsided, many concluded that it was precisely Waldheim’s blandness that had won him the job. “Certainly the Soviet Union, which supported his candidacy, does not expect daring initiatives from this model of noncommittal neutrality,” quipped The New York Times. The paper wasn’t wrong: Moscow had other plans for this secretary-general…
Continues here. Benjamin Kerstein is an associate fellow at the Z3 Institute and author of Self-Defense: A Jewish Manifesto (Wicked Son, 2025).