Word: litvinoffs
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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 ominous-and least likely-explanation of the change: Comrade Stalin had decided to ally himself with Führer Hitler. Obviously Comrade Litvinoff, born of Jewish parents in a Polish town (then Russian), could not be expected to complete such an alliance with rabidly Aryan Nazis...
Whatever Comrade Litvinoff's retirement meant, Britain and France thought it was bad news. It was accepted as good news in a Germany which had not failed to notice that, in his last two or three big speeches, Fiihrer Hitler had dropped his usual tirade against the Bolsheviks. Whether it meant nothing or everything. Comrade Stalin had removed one of the smoothest, most accomplished actors from the world's diplomatic stage...
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...