Maxim's Exit

Officials may come and go with alarming frequency in most Government offices of the U. S. S. R., but not in the Soviet Foreign Commissariat. Amid all the shifts, purges and disappearances of Soviet officials, the Foreign Commissariat's topmost personnel has remained so constant that in 21 years since the proletarian revolution Soviet Russia has had only two Foreign Commissars: Georgy Vasilievich Chicherin, from 1918 to 1930 and Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff, his successor.

Last week Comrade Litvinoff's term abruptly ended, and with his displacement came Europe's sensation of the week. Moscow's radio laconically announced shortly before midnight one night that Comrade Litvinoff had been relieved of his job at "his own request." The Commissar, it was explained later, was ill, had been suffering from heart disease. His job would henceforth be taken by Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, President of the Council of People's Commissars, a member of the all-powerful Political Bureau of the Communist Party, right-hand man to Dictator Joseph Stalin for some 15 years.

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 to stopping Hitler.

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 squarely against dictatorships. Was that era to end? Last week all Europe guessed. Some of the guesses:

> Most ominous--and least likely--explanation of the change: Comrade Stalin had decided to ally himself with Fuehrer 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.

>More likely: the Soviet Union was going to follow an isolationist policy (almost as bad for the British and French). By turning isolationist it would let Herr Hitler know that as long as he keeps away from Russia's vast stretches he need not fear the Red Army. Russia might even supply the Nazis with needed raw materials for conquests.

> Comrade Stalin still hankered after an alliance with Great Britain and France and by dismissing his experienced, alliance-seeking Foreign Commissar was simply trying to scare the British and French into signing up.

But the most likely explanation was that in the bluff and counter-bluff of present European diplomacy, Dictator Stalin was simply clearing the decks to be ready at a moment's notice to jump either way. Foreign Commissar Molotov, inexperienced in diplomacy, represents no fixed foreign policy. Chief claim to U. S. fame was his denunciation of Col. Charles A. Lindbergh as a "paid liar" for alleged slurs on Soviet aviation. Speaking German and French, he will still be able to talk turkey with the British-French "Peace Front." If these talks fail (as they were on the point of doing last week) he can turn to negotiations with the Dictators' front.

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 Poincare 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 it. Red diplomats were shunned everywhere as irresponsible madmen. When Chicherin made his first appearance at an international conference--in Genoa in 1922--he astonished other diplomats by being a polished, cultured scholar.

Chicherin destroyed his health trying to be a one-man Foreign Office. He retired in 1928, was Commissar in name only until 1930, died in 1936, was succeeded by his Vice-Commissar, a former newspaperman, corset salesman and revolutionary hold-up man who had begun his diplomatic career as the first Soviet Ambassador to Great Britain.

Although Comrade Litvinoff outwardly conformed to diplomatic precedent, his language at international powwows was at first considered distinctly bad form. Once, for instance, he threw diplomatic minnesingers off key by proposing--at a disarmament conference of all places--complete disarmament. At a fatuous session of the League of Nations he congratulated the Assembly for "your decisive step backwards." Of the now many times violated Briand-Kellogg Peace Pact he said: "Nothing will come of it." But Soviet Russia signed.

The year of his greatest triumphs was 1933, when he walked away from the otherwise still-born World Economic Conference in London with the embryo of U. S. recognition of the U.S.S.R. The same year he embarked on a series of non-aggression pacts with every Soviet neighbor except Japan. Scared by Adolf Hitler's "if-I-had-the-Ukraine" line of chatter, he played the game of collective security for all it was worth throughout the dictators' aggressions in Ethiopia, Spain, Austria. Last autumn, the Czecho-Slovak crisis found him again at Geneva proposing joint British-French-Russian action to save the Czechs.

At Home. In foreign capitals Litvinoff rode around in a shiny limousine with a tiny red flag attached, stayed at luxurious hotels, ate fine foods, drank good wines, dressed like the traditional diplomat. At home he made no such concessions to bourgeois tastes. He lived in a modest flat with his English-born wife and two handsome children. But Ivy Low Litvinoff, the Soviets' No. 1 hostess, conducted the only Moscow salon and translated novels and plays in her spare time. Fun-loving, witty, bohemian, she once engaged Novelist Theodore Dreiser in a conversation on his specialty, sexual theory, and left him blushing and speechless. Her most famous parties were in the purple splendor of the

Commissar's official mansion, where she was inclined to talk just a little too much for a diplomat's wife. Result was that soon Comrade Ivy was reported as having "moved" to Sverdlovsk, in the Ural Mountains, some 900 miles east of Moscow, where she was following her big hobby of teaching "basic English"--some 850 "essential" English words--to young Russians. Mme Litvinoff was brought back to Moscow for big social functions of the Foreign Commissariat. Last autumn, however, at the usual Soviet reception to diplomats the invitations were written simply in the name of the Foreign Commissar, omitted the usual mention of Mme Litvinoff.

Leaf. If any Moscow foreign correspondent last week knew the whereabouts of Comrade Litvinoff, he did not report it, even though the Soviet Union had suddenly abolished the long practice of censoring newsmen's outgoing despatches. When Adolf Hitler wants to say something really important he convenes his Reichstag. Foreign correspondents last week wondered whether Comrade Stalin was not taking a leaf from the Hitler notebook when there was summoned to meet on May 25 the U.S.S.R. Parliament, the All-Union Congress of Soviets. Last time the Congress met was last August during the fighting between Japan and the Soviet Union at Changkufeng.

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