Word: soviets
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Grigorie J. Sokolnikov, newly appointed Soviet Ambassador to Britain, arrived in London fortnight ago, bought a new dress suit in which to present his credentials to King George, and waited. Eight days passed. Conservatives, chuckling at a chance to embarrass the Labor Government, stood up in Parliament and loudly asked why the new Soviet Ambassador had not been received. Foreign Secretary "Uncle Arthur" Henderson scowled...
...What "Uncle Arthur" meant, what every M. P. and most well-informed Londoners knew, was that the delay was really the fault of His Majesty the King-Emperor. Stubbornly, and to the huge embarrassment of his Labor Government, George V refused to shake the hand of any representative of Soviet Russia, for it was the Soviet Government which decreed the assassination in 1918 of a brown-bearded, nervous little man known to the world as His Imperial Majesty Nicholas II, Tsar of All the Russias, known still to George V of Britain as "Dear Cousin Nicky...
Though Britain began full diplomatic relations with the Soviet in 1924, the necessity of shaking hands with the Tsar's murderers did not arise. At that time Russia had only a chargé d'affaires in London, and mere chargés need not meet the Crown. Ambassadors are different, but all last week Cousin George V remained adamant. "I have not forgotten," said...
Britain's welcome to the Soviet Ambassador, though delayed, was sumptuous. Two coaches from the royal stable carried the Communist party from their hotel to St. James's. Scarlet-coated footmen were on the box, Ambassador Sokolnikov, trying to look proletarian under his silk hat, sat inside with Major-General Sir John Hanbury-Williams, diplomatic corps marshal. In the Ambassadors' Court at St. James's Palace, the Reds were met by four of the King's marshalmen in peaked caps and Elizabethan costumes (resembling a cross between the Jack of Hearts and a master...
...murderous Communist than Ambassador Sokolnikov. Born in 1888, son of a moderately well-to-do bourgeois family, he was exiled for socialist tendencies, went to Paris, where he graduated from the Sorbonne. After the Revolution he returned to Russia, in 1918 was an editorial writer on Pravda, now the Soviet's official mouthpiece. Despite his bourgeois background, he led a Soviet army in Turkestan against counter revolutionists, then became Minister of the Treasury and in 1928 head of the Soviet oil syndicate. In choosing him first Ambassador to Britain, Dictator Josef Stalin picked the Communist most acceptable to Britons...