Word: litvinoffs
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With world headlines screaming the nearest thing to outbreak of a Russo-Japanese war, U. S. Ambassador Joseph E. Davies was last week a busy conciliator in Moscow, conferring with pegleg Japanese Ambassador Mamoru Shigemitsu and portly Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinoff between the bouts of these two diplomats over a pair of uninhabited islands covered with swamp grass which seemed capable of setting Eastern Asia more or less aflame...
...Korean some years ago lodged 32 splinters in Mr. Shigemitsu's leg and forced its amputation. Today he stumps briskly about, aided by a heavy, crooked cane, and last week he was up night after night, stumping into the Soviet Foreign Office at all hours, even after Comrade Litvinoff had gone home to bed, to have just one more go at such able Communist diplomats as bald Boris Stomoniakoff, the Vice-Commissar...
...Siberia and Japan's puppet empire of Manchukuo (see map). Ambassador Shigemitsu was instructed to say that Japanese and Manchukuoan soldiers, while peacefully swimming in the Amur, had been fired upon by a Soviet gunboat, soon sunk by the avenging fire of their shore batteries. To this Commissar Litvinoff replied that a Japanese-Manchukuoan gunboat had opened fire on a Soviet outpost and that as the affray proceeded a Soviet gunboat had indeed been sunk. Soviet lives lost were two, according to Moscow, but Tokyo claimed its guns had slain...
Exactly where all this happened, since the Amur is a meandering stream of several courses, weaving its way among sandbars and low-lying islands which it frequently engulfs, was a matter of some doubt in the minds of Comrade Litvinoff and Mr. Shigemitsu, no matter how precisely they both tried to talk. Two islands known colloquially as "Hayfield" and "Main" emerged from the bickering as places where whatever happened was passionately declared to have occurred. Meanwhile plenty of war-scare was built up by the world press out of plenty of facts which last week cropped...
...their correspondence grew, the revolutionaries referred to themselves and each other by various nicknames. Lunacharsky became "the Destroyer." Litvinoff "Papa"'; Lenin, after trying various signatures such as "Meyer" and "Petroff," became the "Old Man." Lenin's organizing ability, implacable common sense and long view gradually put him in control of the majority (Bolsheviks) in the organization. His letters show that he was not an opportunist but a confessed "necessitarian." "I know, I know it very well, I never forget this, but that is the tragedy (I promise you 'tragedy' is not too strong a word...