Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov

Russian diplomat

• Born: July 17, 1876
• Birthplace: Bialystok, Poland, Russian Empire
• Died: December 31, 1951
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Litvinov, the most prominent Soviet diplomat of the interwar period, was a leading advocate of world peace through universal disarmament during the 1920’s. In the 1930’s, he negotiated American recognition of the Soviet Union and became the main spokesperson for the Soviet policy of collective security with the Western powers against German, Japanese, and Italian aggression before World War II.

Early Life

Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov (muhk-SYEEM muhk-SYEE-muh-vyihch liht-VEE-nuhf) was born Meier Moiseevich Wallach, the son of middle-class Jewish parents. His father, Moses Wallach, was a successful produce merchant who, while maintaining a traditional religious life at home, was well known in the local community for his liberal political views. Young Meier, however, at first showed little interest in either politics or religion and, in 1893, at the age of seventeen, joined the Russian army in an effort to escape the tedium of provincial Russian life. While in the army, Meier was slowly converted to Marxism. He was eventually discharged from the army for a violation of military regulations and traveled to Kiev, where he joined the local section of the newly formed Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP).

During the next two decades, the twenty-two-year-old Wallach would dedicate himself entirely to the Russian Revolutionary movement. Tall, energetic, single-minded, and intense, he cut all ties with the past and worked tirelessly as an underground organizer in the laboring districts of Kiev. It was during this period that he adopted the pseudonym Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov, the name “Litvinov” being taken from a character in a novel by his favorite Russian author, Ivan Turgenev. Arrested in 1901, he spent thirteen months in prison before escaping and, after a brief period of renewed activity in the Kievan underground, fled abroad to the West. While in exile, Litvinov met Vladimir Ilich Lenin for the first time in London. Deeply impressed by Lenin’s overall analysis of the Russian situation, Litvinov supported the Bolshevik faction at the Second Congress of the RSDWP in 1903.

Once committed to Bolshevism, Litvinov never wavered. Never a theoretician, he avoided all party controversies and followed Lenin’s instructions without question. Lenin, in turn, valued him for his personal as well as political loyalty. He saw him as a competent and reliable agent and organizer and over the years assigned him to some of the party’s most difficult tasks. In 1912, he was appointed the permanent Bolshevik representative to the International Socialist Bureau in Great Britain and supported Lenin’s position on the war in 1914. Two years later, he married Ivy Low, a novelist and member of a noted English literary family. The couple would have two children in England before their lives were changed forever by the great upheavals in Russia in 1917.

Life’s Work

The Bolshevik Revolution marked the beginning of Litvinov’s career as a diplomat and statesman. It transformed him, within the relatively brief period of a decade, from an isolated, virtually unknown revolutionary living in exile into a major actor on the international stage. In this new role, Litvinov would become the main spokesperson for the Soviet policy of antifascism and collective security during the 1930’s. He would lead a worldwide campaign against German, Japanese, and Italian aggression, head the Soviet delegations to the World Disarmament Conference and League of Nations, and secure diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States. By the time of his death in December, 1951, he would be regarded in the Soviet Union as a minor hero, and he has remained the symbol of Soviet efforts during the interwar period to establish closer cooperation with the West.

Initially, however, Litvinov’s diplomatic debut was far from auspicious. In January, 1918, while still in London, he was appointed the first Soviet representative to Great Britain. Unrecognized by the British government, he was arrested for revolutionary agitation in December and, after a brief period of imprisonment, was exchanged for Robert Bruce Lockhart, a British agent who had been interned in Moscow the same year.

Once back in Russia, however, Litvinov’s career progressed rapidly. A man of exceptional administrative skills who had the full confidence of Lenin, his long years of exile in the West had provided him with an excellent knowledge of Western languages and culture. In addition, many Soviet leaders believed that it would be useful to have an “Old Bolshevik” such as Litvinov join the Soviet diplomatic hierarchy to monitor the activities of Georgi Vasilievich Chicherin, a born aristocrat and former Menshevik who had replaced Leon Trotsky as people’s commissar of foreign affairs in 1918. In April, 1919, therefore, Litvinov was made a member of the collegium of the Soviet Foreign Commissariat (the Narkomindel), and appointed vice commissar of foreign affairs under Chicherin’s ostensible leadership the following year. From then on, the two men occupied their positions as thinly veiled rivals. While Litvinov did not possess Chicherin’s extraordinary memory or brilliance, he was often shrewder and more resourceful in negotiations and carried greater political weight. In 1926, as Chicherin’s health began to fail, Litvinov gradually came to assume effective control over the Narkomindel’s daily operations. Four years later, when his erstwhile superior finally retired, he was officially appointed People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, a position that he was to hold for nine fateful years.

At the time when Litvinov became effective head of the Narkomindel, Bolshevik leaders still regarded Great Britain and France as their main international enemies and the League of Nations as the chief agency of Western imperialism. Indeed, despite Chicherin’s successful efforts to achieve diplomatic recognition by most of the world’s great powers, the Soviet Union was still looked on with suspicion by the majority of the capitalist nations and continued to be ignored by the United States and many of the Slavic countries of Eastern Europe. Litvinov, however, proved to be ideally suited to deal with these problems. Flexible and pragmatic, he never seems to have succumbed to the anti-Western xenophobia that permeated much of the Bolshevik hierarchy. In addition, like the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, he had little faith in the prospects for world revolution and preferred, instead, to rely on traditional power politics to guarantee the security of the Soviet state. Litvinov’s relationship with Stalin, in fact, was that of loyal deputy and faithful follower. While he did privately express some concern over the ruthlessness of Stalin’s methods, his confidence in the Soviet leader never seems to have been shaken, even when the purges of the mid-1930’s decimated Narkomindel personnel.

From the very beginning of his tenure as chief spokesperson for Soviet foreign policy, Litvinov’s main aim was to ease tensions with the Western powers and to normalize relations with as many of the Soviet Union’s neighbors as possible. In 1927, shortly after taking over for the ailing Chicherin, he made a dramatic appearance before the Preparatory Commission of the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva and delivered a ringing call for complete and universal disarmament. The speech, which would be repeated with somewhat different emphasis at the Disarmament Conference itself in 1932, created a sensation in the Western press and gained for him his first international notoriety. Two years later, in 1929, the Soviet Union joined with sixty-five other nations in signing the Kellogg-Briand Pact , which outlawed war as an instrument of national policy. During the negotiations, Litvinov was able to take advantage of the general optimism created by the occasion to formulate a separate agreement (the so-called Litvinov Protocol), which applied the pact on a regional basis and was signed by the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Turkey, Persia, and the Free City of Danzig. In 1932, he extended these agreements by concluding nonaggression pacts with France, Finland, Poland, Estonia, and Latvia and, in one of his greatest diplomatic achievements, was able to secure United States recognition of the Soviet Union the following year.

The moderately pro-Western drift in Soviet foreign policy during Litvinov’s early years underwent a decided acceleration after the triumph of Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933. Unlike many of their Western counterparts, Soviet leaders were convinced that Hitler was sincere in his professed aim of attacking the Soviet Union and acquiring Lebensraum (“living space”) for the German people in the East. Starting in 1934, therefore, Litvinov launched a concerted campaign to isolate the fascist powers and develop a global system of collective security. In September, the Soviet Union formally joined the League of Nations. During the following year, the Soviet Union concluded treaties of mutual assistance with France and Czechoslovakia, supported sanctions against Italy during the invasion of Ethiopia, and sought to mobilize world opinion against Germany and Japan. Between 1934 and 1938, in fact, Litvinov became the spearhead of Soviet efforts to combat the policy of appeasement. He advocated League action against Germany during the remilitarization of the Rhineland, repeatedly denounced Japanese aggression in China, and tried to forge a common front with the Western powers in defense of the republican government in Spain.

Nothing, however, seemed capable of stirring the democratic powers to action. In September, 1938, the decision of Great Britain and France to exclude the Soviet Union from the Munich Conference on Czechoslovakia seems to have convinced Stalin of the futility of any further effort to pursue a policy of collective security. On May 3, 1939, therefore, Litvinov was dismissed from his position as People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs. A Jew who was closely identified with the Western powers, he was now seen as an obstacle to improved relations with Berlin. On August 23, 1939, Litvinov’s successor, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, formally concluded a nonaggression pact with Germany. Nine days later, Hitler attacked Poland, and Europe entered World War II.

The last years of Litvinov’s diplomatic career were clearly anticlimatic. During the period when the Nazi-Soviet Pact remained in effect, he lived in Moscow in relative obscurity. In December, 1941, however, after Hitler launched his assault on the Soviet Union, he was appointed Soviet ambassador to Washington, where he worked for a smooth functioning of the Grand Alliance. Recalled to the Soviet Union in August, 1943, he was made vice commissar of foreign affairs under Molotov and retired from governmental service in 1946. During his last five years, he lived in the Soviet capital and died peacefully at the age of seventy-five.

Significance

Maksim Maksimovich Litvinov was the most outstanding figure in Soviet diplomacy during the interwar period. Passionate, persuasive, and eloquent, he came to symbolize the pro-Western, antifascist, and antimilitarist efforts of the Soviet government to promote collective security between 1934 and 1938. During these years, he developed a considerable following among those segments of the Western public opposed to appeasement, and his often inspired oratory at Geneva made him one of the most visible diplomats on the international scene.

Even at the height of his influence, however, Litvinov did not have the power to determine Soviet foreign policy. Soviet policy was made in the Soviet Politburo, not the foreign commissariat. Representatives of the Narkomindel (of which Litvinov was the most important) were often invited to participate in the discussions, but final decisions were left to the Politburo itself (and presumably Stalin). Indeed, despite his long years of service, Litvinov was never fully admitted to the inner circle of the party. Although he was elected to the Central Committee in 1934, membership in the Politburo always eluded him, and he often complained of international initiatives taken without his knowledge or over his head.

Nevertheless, despite his limited ability to influence decisions, Litvinov’s acumen as an executor of Soviet foreign policy cannot be questioned. He was naturally gregarious, and his tactical skill in conducting negotiations with the United States in 1933 and France in 1935 won the begrudging respect of his supporters and detractors alike. His main contribution, however, was as an advocate of collective security and closer cooperation with the West against the fascist powers. While this policy did not bear immediate fruit during the 1930’s, it helped to reintegrate the Soviet Union into the international states system and provided the foundation for the creation of the Grand Alliance during World War II.

Bibliography

Beloff, Max. The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1929-1941. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1947-1949. A concise and generally dispassionate analysis of Soviet foreign policy during the Litvinov era. Although superseded by a number of later works on specialized topics, Beloff’s book is still useful for its general overview of early Soviet diplomacy under Stalin.

Degras, Jane, ed. Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, 1917-1941. 3 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1951-1953. The standard source for documents on Soviet foreign policy during the interwar period. Degras’s three volumes include treaties, decrees, communiqués, articles from leading Soviet journals, and the speeches of major Soviet statesmen.

Fischer, Louis. Russia’s Road from Peace to War: Soviet Foreign Relations, 1917-1941. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. A scholarly and highly readable book by an author who first went to the Soviet Union in 1922 and knew many of its leaders, including Litvinov, personally. The work contains many insights into Litvinov’s personality and offers a convincing summary of Soviet policy as a whole.

Gaddis, John Lewis. Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the interplay of interests and ideology that has characterized Soviet-American relations since the Bolshevik Revolution. The work contains an excellent chapter on the Litvinov-Roosevelt negotiations and an annotated bibliography.

Kennan, George F. Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961. An eloquent and thoughtful assessment of the relationship between the Soviet Union and the major Western powers from 1917 to the end of World War II. Although heavily weighted toward the 1917-1921 period, the book details the phobias and suspicions that helped prevent effective Soviet-Western cooperation in the decade before 1939.

Pope, Arthur Upham. Maxim Litvinoff. New York: L. B. Fischer, 1943. A sympathetic account of Litvinov’s life and career by his American biographer. Pope benefited from several interviews with Litvinov, and his book remains indispensable for its treatment of Litvinov’s early years.

Roberts, Geoffrey. “Litvinov’s Lost Peace, 1941-1946.” Journal of Cold War Studies 4, no. 2 (Spring, 2002): 23-54. Focuses on Litvinov’s role in conceiving and building the Grand Alliance with Great Britain and the United States to enable the three nations to defeat the Axis powers in World War II.

Roberts, Henry L. “Maxim Litvinov.” In The Diplomats, 1919-1939, edited by Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert. New York: Atheneum, 1963. This article provides a thorough analysis of the content of Litvinov’s diplomatic policies, his views on the purges and world revolution, and his relationship to the Soviet Politburo.

Ulam, Adam B. Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-1973. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974. An exhaustive analysis of the personal, political, and ideological factors that helped shape Soviet foreign policy during the country’s first six decades. The best survey available in one volume in English.