LITVINOV, MAXIM MAXIMOVICH

LITVINOV, MAXIM MAXIMOVICH (Wallach, Meir-Henokh Moiseevitch; 1867–1951) Russian revolutionary and Soviet diplomat. Born in Bialystok, Litvinov joined the illegal Social-Democratic Party in 1899 and was arrested and exiled. In 1902 he escaped to Switzerland and in 1903, after having joined the Bolshevik faction, he returned clandestinely to Russia and took part in the 1905 Revolution. He collaborated with Maxim Gorki on the newspaper Novaya Zhizn ("The New Life"). After the failure of the revolution he fled from Russia and lived in France and England. While in England he became closely associated with lenin and was instrumental in various underground operations of the Bolsheviks, including the smuggling of arms to the Caucasus. In London Litvinov married Ivy Low, niece of the English historian Sir Sidney low . Following the October Revolution in 1917 Litvinov was made Soviet diplomatic agent to Britain, but he was detained by the British government and exchanged for Bruce Lockhart, the British diplomatic agent in Soviet Russia. In 1921 he became deputy commissar for foreign affairs under Chicherin, and from 1930 until 1939 he was commissar of foreign affairs of the Soviet Union, concentrating in the field of Soviet diplomacy, particularly with the West. In 1919 he negotiated the first peace treaty of Soviet Russia (with Estonia), took part in the international conference in Genoa in 1922, which resulted in the Rapallo Treaty with Germany, and headed the Soviet delegation to the subsequent conference at The Hague and the disarmament conference in Geneva (1927). He was active in the USSR's joining of the League of Nations and represented it there in 1934–38. In 1933, at Franklin D. Roosevelt 's invitation, he personally conducted the negotiations for the establishment of American-Soviet diplomatic relations. In the period of Moscow's anti-Nazi policy (1934–39), Litvinov became the chief Soviet spokesman at the League of Nations where he demanded the establishment of a collective security system. However, in May 1939, when stalin decided to reverse his policy and to effect a rapprochement with Hitler at the expense of the West, Litvinov, being a Jew and known as a protagonist of a pro-Western orientation, was replaced by Stalin's closest collaborator, V.M. Molotov; in February 1941 he was even dropped from the party's central committee. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941, Litvinov was appointed Soviet ambassador to the United States, where he remained until 1943. He was reappointed assistant commissar for foreign affairs for a short period in 1946, but retired soon afterwards. His publications include The Bolshevik Revolution, its Rise and Meaning (1918) and Against Aggression, Speeches by Maxim Litvinov (1939). Litvinov was never self-conscious about being a Jew. He became a lonely, forgotten figure in the last years of his life when Stalin's antisemitic campaign was in full swing. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: A.U. Pope, Maxim Litvinoff (Eng., 1943); G.A. Craig and F. Gilbert (eds.), Diplomats 1919–1939 (1953), 344–77; D.G. Bishop, Roosevelt-Litvinov Agreements: The American View (1965); B.D. Wolfe, Strange Communists I Have Known (1965), 207–22; G.F. Kennan, Russia and the West (1960), index. (Binyamin Eliav)