Maxim Litvinov: Stalin’s only good guy?
Maxim Litvinov, 1876 - 1951 by Samuel Johnson Woolf
If we look at high-ranking Soviet politicians over the USSR’s three quarters of a century, it is not easy to find “good guys”. I think the nearest we have to one is Maxim Litvinov (1876-1951).
Remembered today as the main proponent of “collective security” against Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Litvinov had been born Meir Henoch Wallach in Bialystok (now in Poland but then part of the Russian Empire) as the scion of a Jewish banking family. He changed his name to Litvinov aged 22 when he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1903 he became one of Lenin’s supporters when the Party split into Bolsheviks (the majority) and Mensheviks (the minority). Nobody who has seen his early portrait (from 1902) could doubt his revolutionary credentials. He looked like a Russian revolutionary, and he was indeed a Russian revolutionary.
Litvinov in 1902
In 1906 Litvinov moved to Paris, where he continued to work for the revolutionary cause in Russia by buying, among other things, arms for the Party. In 1907 he attended the fifth Party Congress, also in London, where he shared accommodation with Joseph Stalin. That association led to close lifelong contacts between them, even what could be called friendship — assuming that Stalin was capable of having such sentiments. In 1908 he was arrested in France, the police finding him in possession of 500 rouble notes which had been taken in a robbery in Georgia (robbing mail coaches was one of Stalin’s specialities) in the previous year. The Tsarist government asked for his extradition, but it was denied by the French government, who washed their hands of the affair. Instead they quickly exiled him, presumably keeping the banknotes as corpus delicti.
From 1910 to 1918, Litvinov lived in England. In 1916 he married Ivy Low, who stood by his side all his life and often helped him with a woman’s insight in his diplomatic work. After the Bolsheviks took power in November 1917, he acted as their unofficial representative in London. In 1918 Litvinov returned to Russia where, due to his European experience, he was immediately entrusted to work on diplomatic problems involving prisoner exchanges. In 1921 he was appointed by Lenin as First Deputy People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs and was promoted by Stalin to be Commissar (effectively Foreign Minister) in 1930.
He started his international diplomatic career by supporting the idea of disarmament. It was a fairly hopeless enterprise. Ever since our ancestors invented the club they had been reluctant to abandon it. Needless to say, attempts to put disarmament in practice were all unsuccessful. Litvinov’s reputation does not rest on that. He rose to fame as the most consistent critic of the Italian and German dictatorships and of the Japanese attack on China. His opportunity came in early 1933, a few weeks after Hitler rose to power. He defined aggression: what is and what is not aggression in terms of international relations. Stalin gave him a relatively free hand; he was too busy killing off his friends and enemies at home. Foreign policy was not yet one of his priorities.
In the interval between 1933 and his dismissal in 1939 Litvinov tried to erect a cordon sanitaire round the European dictatorships. He wanted to build an alliance between France, Britain and the Soviet Union, mainly against Nazi Germany. He managed to change Soviet foreign policy, based on class war at the time by the Comintern. They held the view that the workers of the world would soon unite to build happy Communist states all over the world. The idea was to support the local Communist parties and oppose all other political forces. The best example of this policy was their attitude to the German Social Democrats. They called them Social Fascists and regarded them as enemies.
In contrast, Litvinov’s policy was to unite all forces opposing fascism. It was the policy of the Popular Front: to unite all anti-aggression forces independently of where they stood in the political spectrum. Had it united the paramilitary forces of the Social Democrats (Reichsbanner) and of the Communists (Roter Frontkampferbund), they might have been able to rule the streets in Berlin, keeping the Brownshirts (SA) at bay and delaying — perhaps even preventing — the Nazi takeover.
Was the policy of the Popular Front successful? No, it came too late. The only country in Europe that had a Popular Front Government was France. In the 1936 elections the parties supporting the Popular Front government there had 368 seats in the Chamber of Deputies out of a total of 608 . The government did not last long. It was unable to sustain all the social refoms (eg the 40 hour working week) combined with rearmament and support for the Spanish Republicans in their war with the Nationalists.
On the 3rd of May 1939 Litvinov was dismissed as Foreign Minister by Stalin. Why? U-turns are traditionally difficult to explain. Not this one. Stalin was obviously thinking of a Soviet-German Pact. Litvinov, with his Jewish background, could not possibly negotiate such agreement.
The second question is more difficult to answer. How did he survive the purges? Did Stalin remember the times they spent together in London in 1907? Unlikely. Stalin was a mass-murderer. He would not have had the slightest hesitation putting Litvinov’s name on the list of those to be liquidated. Stalin probably realised that friendship with the Germans could not possibly last. He might have wanted to keep Litvinov for the times when the Germans would again be enemies. He might have been preparing for that inevitable conflict, the aim being to gain time and use it to prepare Soviet defences for the German assault.
This is what Stalin should have done. He did not do it, for reasons unknown. In fact, Stalin was remarkably naïve about the Germans honouring the treaty. The last Soviet train delivering war material for the Third Reich crossed the border the day the Germans attacked. Nor did Stalin reinforce Soviet defences. The Soviet Army collapsed like a castle built on sand. In the first few weeks of the war the Germans advanced more than a thousand kilometers. The only thing that saved the Soviet Union was the Russian winter.
So how does this explain Litvinov’s survival? To my mind the best explanation is that he missed his slot. By the end of 1939 Stalin was running out of Old Bolsheviks spying for the Germans. A trial of Litvinov on his own might have given him too much importance. While Stalin hesitated, Litvinov died — in bed, and not until 1951. The English language Wikipedia quotes two scenarios proposed by other members of the Politburo. According to Molotov Litvinov’s survival was due to some random factors delaying trials (I presume it could have been the suicide of a key witness or the arrest of a prosecutor). Mikoyan, another member of the Politburo, is quoted saying that Litvinov was assassinated on Stalin’s orders by staging a traffic incident. This scenario is denied by Litvinov’s family who maintain that he died of a heart attack at home. The same thing (that he died natural death) was told me by his granddaughter Masha Slonim, who I met several times in London. She added to it that her grandfather always slept with a loaded gun under his pillow.
The Russian language Wikipedia gives a lot of further information on the preparation of a Litvinov trial for which Beria already had witnesses lined up the usual way. Apparently, everything was ready but Beria, past his best efficiency, was slow to act. Meanwhile Germany attacked and Litvinov suddenly became useful. Having said above that the Soviet Union was saved by the Russian winter, I could say by the same degree of approximation that Litvinov was saved by the German assault. In November 1941 Stalin appointed him Soviet Ambassador to the United States. Litvinov and his wife became an instant success in Washington. They did a lot to ensure US support for the Soviet Union, both within and without the Lend-Lease scheme, until he returned to Russia in 1943.
Finally, I want to answer my question: was Litvinov a “good guy?” All that was written about him above would qualify him as one. But he is also on record denying Stalin’s famines in the Soviet Union and being on Committees judging his innocent victims. If the Soviet archives are ever opened we might learn the truth. Until then probably the best assumption is that there were no good guys in the higher echelons of the Communist Party and the Soviet government. Stalin made sure of that.
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