Word: diplomatic
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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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...
...Home. In foreign capitals Litvinoff rode around in a shiny limousine with a tiny red flag attached, stayed at luxurious hotels, ate fine foods, drank good wines, dressed like the traditional diplomat. At home he made no such concessions to bourgeois tastes. He lived in a modest flat with his English-born wife and two handsome children. But Ivy Low Litvinoff, the Soviets' No. 1 hostess, conducted the only Moscow salon and translated novels and plays in her spare time. Fun-loving, witty, bohemian, she once engaged Novelist Theodore Dreiser in a conversation on his specialty, sexual theory...
Commissar's official mansion, where she was inclined to talk just a little too much for a diplomat's wife. Result was that soon Comrade Ivy was reported as having "moved" to Sverdlovsk, in the Ural Mountains, some 900 miles east of Moscow, where she was following her big hobby of teaching "basic English"-some 850 "essential" English words-to young Russians. Mme Litvinoff was brought back to Moscow for big social functions of the Foreign Commissariat. Last autumn, however, at the usual Soviet reception to diplomats the invitations were written simply in the name of the Foreign...
...servants. The majority have titles. Eight went to Oxford or Cambridge, one to Edinburgh, two into the Army and Navy. One is an educator (Will Spens, Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge), one a big businessman (John Boot, Lord Trent, head of the great Boots drugstore chain), one a diplomat (Sir Auckland Geddes, Ambassador to Washington, 1920-24), one a labor specialist (Harold Butler, former Director of the International Labor Office, Geneva). Five have had long Government experience, six saw active War duty. One makes the paper for English bank notes. One has an inferiority complex. One is stone-deaf...
Wednesday 1 a.m. A summons called the visiting diplomat to the Chancellery. Dr. Hácha was ushered into Herr Hitler's work room. There, besides the Führer and his aides, were numerous army generals, who throughout the interview were periodically sent out for mysterious phone calls to Prague. (The same form of pressure was applied to Kurt von Schuschnigg at Berchtesgaden...