Word: litvinoff
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...innocuous jobs (publisher's assistant, bookkeeper, language teacher, corset salesman), took on Western airs and a Western wife. She was Ivy Low, radical daughter of an English writer. He came to admire the works of Henry James, Jane Austen, Beethoven and Bach; he took up contract bridge. But Litvinoff remained Bolshevik to the core-a blunt, opportunistic, skeptical revolutionary, with a keen, mousetrap kind of mind that was wired always to orders from home...
...Waiting Room. After the Revolution, Trotsky made Litvinoff Ambassador to Britain. The British refused to accept him, agreed only grudgingly to deal with him through a Foreign Office clerk. For a while, the two met by a kiosk behind the Foreign Office. But after a few pathetic meetings in the rain, the Foreign Office relented: it allowed Litvinoff inside as far as the waiting room...
When he came to England again, in 1936, Maxim Litvinoff got an audience with the King and all the amenities. Papasha-and the Soviet Union-had climbed to respectability. As Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs (1920-30) and then as Commissar, Litvinoff had cut through the "barbed-wire fence" which France's Clemenceau had persuaded the West to raise around Russia. He sold most of the Western world on the proposition that Communism was able & willing to cooperate with the West...
...became the apostle of disarmament, of collective security, and of opposition to the Nazis. "Peace is indivisible" was his famous phrase. He was personally liked and respected-a far warmer person than the cunning Vishinsky or the robot Gromyko -but only the gullible believed that there was a Litvinoff policy that differed from a Stalin policy...
Died. Maxim Litvinoff, 75, onetime Soviet Foreign Commissar (1929-39) and Ambassador to the U.S. (1941-43); in Moscow (see FOREIGN NEWS...