Word: commissar
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Comrade Stalin still hankered after an alliance with Great Britain and France and by dismissing his experienced, alliance-seeking Foreign Commissar was simply trying to scare the British and French into signing...
Those who knew that Commissar Litvinoff actually does take rest cures at Continental watering places for heart trouble might have accepted the Soviet "request" theory at its face value had it been made at any other time. But only 36 hours later Foreign Minister Josef Beck of Poland was to make an important reply to Adolf Hitler before the Polish Parliament (see p. 21). The British and French press were beginning to talk about "appeasing" the Germans again (see p. 21), at a time when the "Peace Front" was considering involved negotiations with the Soviet Union with a view...
...Commissar Litvinoff has never been much of a power inside the Soviet Union. He was not even a member of the Political Bureau and had been a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee for only five years. He probably did not even formulate Soviet Foreign policy; he was a brilliant diplomatic technician. But in the world's eyes he was identified with that era of Soviet policy when the U. S. S. R. backed up strongly every move to curb the aggressors, pushed forward the principles of collective security, allied itself with democracies, put its face...
...most likely explanation was that in the bluff and counter-bluff of present European diplomacy, Dictator Stalin was simply clearing the decks to be ready at a moment's notice to jump either way. Foreign Commissar Molotov, inexperienced in diplomacy, represents no fixed foreign policy. Chief claim to U. S. fame was his denunciation of Col. Charles A. Lindbergh as a "paid liar" for alleged slurs on Soviet aviation. Speaking German and French, he will still be able to talk turkey with the British-French "Peace Front." If these talks fail (as they were on the point of doing...
Aristocrat's Assistant. Maxim Maxi-movich Litvinoff cut his diplomatic eyeteeth in the service of the great Georgy Chicherin, aristocratic, Tolstoyan figure who grew up to be a Tsarist diplomat and later renounced his inheritance to become a hunted revolutionary. Chicherin-with Litvinoff as his Vice-Commissar-struggled in the early 1920s to break through the cordon sanitaire which French President Raymond Poincaré had tried to weld around hated Red Russia. The Soviet Union was not even permitted a seat in the spectators' gallery at the Versailles Peace Conference. Many a country refused to recognize...