RUSSIA: The Other Face

• Share

He was born Meer Genokh Moiseevich Vallakh, the son of a Jewish bank clerk in Polish Russia. On police dockets of Czarist Russia and most of the countries of Europe, he was many aliases—Ludwig Nietz, Maxim Harrison, David Mordecai, Felix. To Lenin, Stalin and the other Old Bolsheviks, he was Papasha (papa dear), one of the trusted inner circle. The rest of the world got to know him as Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff. For two confusing decades, he was one of Russia's two faces —the false one.

His early years fitted him for the Communist aristocracy—a poor childhood, the Czar's army at 18, underground intrigue with secret printing presses, a term in prison, escape. In exile, he became boss of the party's international "transport," which is Communist doubletalk for the smuggling of arms, money and secret communications. "As long as Papasha is there," Lenin remarked admiringly one day in 1904, "we shall have transport."

The French deported Papasha in 1908, when they caught him passing 500-ruble notes stolen in the bloody Tiflis bank robbery engineered by Joseph Stalin. In England, as gentle, homy Mr. Harrison of Harrington Square, he erected a façade of 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.

The 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.

He constructed a network of treaties between Russia and 14 countries. He negotiated with Roosevelt for U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933. He got Russia a seat in the League of Nations. There, in passionate, blunt speeches, delivered in an English that was both Cockney and Slavic in accent, he 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.