Word: litvinov
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...millions imprisoned by its Iron Curtain, but on the nations without. It was barely a month since Joseph Stalin died, yet in that short spell his heirs had launched a busy peace offensive. They talked of peace in more earnest-sounding tones than they had used since Litvinov's heyday. They made concessions where the conceding did them no hurt: a da instead of a nyet in the U.N. Security Council, a pardon for a drunken Briton held in a Moscow jail, an agreement to talk over the exchange of wounded prisoners in Korea...
...Koba became the appropriations member of the Caucasian Bolshevik Bureau, i.e., he directed "fighting squads" which robbed banks, public treasuries, steamships. His biggest haul: a quarter of a million rubles in a stickup in the main square of Tiflis. Among those arrested as a result of this raid was Litvinov, future Commissar for Foreign Affairs, who was trying to dispose of the loot in Paris. Koba, although on the police "wanted" list, managed to keep in the background. He was a terrorist, but a terrorist who operated through committees. This was caution; none ever questioned his personal courage...
Even the small news reflected general unhappiness, despair, and ill will. A soldier killed in Korea had some trouble being admitted to the cemetery for veterans in Phoenix, Arizona, because he was a Negro; Maxim Litvinov, old Russian diplomat and symbol of Soviet cooperation with the West before and during World War II, died in Moscow while the Russian government did not exactly wax lyrical over his accomplishments; Governor Talmadge of Georgia complained about Negro and white entertainers appearing together on television; Boston's Mayor Hines cracked down on certain night spots for lewdness, condemning female impersonators and ordering burlesque...