Word: litvinoff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nine years Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff trotted about Europe as the Foreign Commissar of Soviet Russia. Although he had never been much of a power within the Soviet Union, he was one of the few old-line Bolsheviks who could talk to capitalist diplomats in their own language. He made an able traveling salesman for Joseph Stalin. At the endless, shilly-shallying, post-war conferences he was the vigorous symbol of an era when the Soviet was plugging the theory of collective security, backed every democratic move aimed at the Axis. But he was sold out all along the line...
...last fortnight Comrade Litvinoff and the policies he stood for had been parked in the wings for two years. When the National Conference of the Soviet Communist Party met in Moscow he was just an obscure member of the Central Communist Committee. On the closing day of the Conference last week even that post was taken away from him. Ousted with three other Committee members for "inability to discharge obligations," Comrade Litvinoff, an old revolutionary who had worked with Lenin on the early Communist Iskra (Spark), who once played the fence for money stolen in a train robbery by Comrade...
Their appointments sounded like an overture to Germany with one hand, a threatening minor for the rest of Finland with the other. Cagey Comrade Stalin was still beating out Red diplomacy 16 to the bar. Appointed as an alternate member of the Committee was Litvinoff's old friend, Anglophile Ivan Maisky, Ambassador to the Court of St. James...
Molotov Era. In Russia Litvinoff had stood for the idea of collective security; abroad he had represented Russia's desire for collective security. It was not Litvinoff but collective security that fell. To symbolize Russia's new reliance on herself, Joseph Stalin picked a man who represented the state bureaucracy he had created. An old-guard Bolshevik, Molotov was a quiet political boss who had risen through hard, unspectacular work to be President of the Council of People's Commissars (Premier) and a member of the powerful Politbureau. In Russia he was known as the father...
...short, has a too-big head, and stammers. He looks like an unsuccessful Theodore Roosevelt. He drives himself as he drives his subordinates, holds conferences all day long, usually eats dinner at his desk. Even when he goes to a formal dinner he never wears a black tie (Litvinoff wore a white tie), and his only sartorial concession to his new job was to replace his cloth cap with a black...