Maxim Maximovich Litvinov (; born Meir Henoch Wallach-Finkelstein; 17 July 1876 – 31 December 1951) was a Russian revolutionary and prominent Soviet statesman and diplomat who served as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs from 1930 to 1939.
Litvinov was an advocate for diplomatic agreements leading to disarmament, and was influential in making the Soviet Union a party to the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Pact. He was also responsible for the 1929 Litvinov Protocol, a multilateral agreement to implement the Kellogg-Briand Pact between the Soviet Union and several neighboring states.
In 1930, Litvinov was appointed People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs, the highest diplomatic position in the USSR. During the 1930s, Litvinov advocated the official Soviet policy of collective security with Western powers against Nazi Germany.
Early life and first exile
Meir Henoch Wallach was born into a wealthy, Yiddish-speaking, Lithuanian Jewish banking family in Białystok, Grodno Governorate, Russian Empire. Meir was the second son of Moses and Anna Wallach. In 1881, Moses Wallach was arrested, held in prison for six weeks, then released without charge. Meir was educated at a local realschule; in 1893 he joined the army but was discharged in 1898 after he allegedly disobeyed an order to fire into a crowd of striking workers in Baku. That year, in Kiev, Wallach joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), which was considered an illegal organization; it was customary for its members to use pseudonyms. Meir changed his name to Maxim Litvinov—a common Litvak surname—but was also known as "Papasha" and "Maximovich". Litvinov also wrote articles under the names "M.G. Harrison" and "David Mordecai Finkelstein".
Litvinov's early responsibilities included propaganda work in the Chernigov Governorate. In 1900, Litvinov became a member of the Kiev party committee, all of whom were arrested in 1901. After 18 months in custody, Litvinov and Nikolay Bauman organised a mass escape of 11 inmates from Lukyanivska Prison, overpowering a warden and using ropes and grappling irons to scale the walls. Litvinov moved to Geneva, where the founder of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov, enlisted him as an agent of the revolutionary newspaper Iskra. Litvinov organised a route to smuggle the newspaper from Germany into Russia.
In July 1903, Litvinov was in London for the party's second congress when the RSDLP split. He became a founding member of the Bolshevik faction under Vladimir Lenin, whom Litvinov first met in the British Museum Reading Room.Holroyd-Doveton, p. 2 The two went to Hyde Park to hear some of the speeches, and remained in contact with each other during this period. Litvinov returned to Russia during the 1905 Revolution, when he became editor of the RSDLP's first legal newspaper Novaya Zhizn in Saint Petersburg.
Second emigration
When the Russian government began arresting the Bolsheviks in 1906, Maxim Litvinov left the country and spent the next ten years as an émigré and arms dealer for the party. He based himself in Paris and travelled throughout Europe. Posing as an officer in the Ecuadorian Army, he bought machine guns from the State Munitions Factory in Denmark, and posing as a Belgian businessman, he bought more weapons from Schroeder and Company of Germany. He then arranged for the whole consignment to be transported to Bulgaria, where he told the authorities the arms were destined for Macedonian and Armenian rebels fighting for independence in the Ottoman Empire. Litvinov then bought a yacht, and handed it and the weapons to the Armenian revolutionary Kamo to be smuggled across the Black Sea. The yacht, however, ran aground and the weapons were stolen by Romanian fishermen. Despite this setback, Litvinov successfully smuggled other shipments of these arms into Russia via Finland and the Black Sea.Rappaport, pp. 136–137.
In 1907, Litvinov attended the fifth RSDLP congress in London. Initially, he relied on Rowton Houses for accommodation in London but the party eventually arranged a rented house for Litvinov, which he shared with Joseph Stalin, who also wanted to find more-comfortable housing than the Rowton hostels.Rappaport, p. 144.
In January 1908, French police arrested Litvinov under the name Meer Wallach while carrying twelve 500-ruble banknotes that had been stolen in a bank robbery in Tiflis the year before. The Russian government demanded his extradition and the French Minister for Justice Aristide Briand ruled Litvinov's crime was political and ordered him to be deported. He went to Belfast, Ireland, where he joined his sister Rifka and her family.Jonathan Hamill, "The Red Under Our Bed," Old Belfast 9, 3 August 2011. https://issuu.com/glenravel/docs/oldbelfast9/24 There, he taught foreign languages in the Jewish Jaffe Public Elementary School until 1910.
Litvinov moved to England in 1910 and lived there for eight years. In 1912, he replaced Lenin as the Bolshevik representative on the International Socialist Bureau. When the First World War broke out in 1914, the Russian government requested all Russian émigrés who were in allied England and eligible for military service return to serve in the Imperial Russian Army. Litvinov was able to convince the English officer who interviewed him that he would be tried rather than conscripted if he returned to Russia.Holroyd-Doveton, p. 8
In February 1915, Litvinov, uninvited, attended a conference of socialists from the Triple Entente that included Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Emile Vandervelde; and the Mensheviks Yuri Martov and Ivan Maisky. Lenin prepared a statement demanding every socialist who held a government post should resign and opposing the continuation of the war. The conference chairman refused to allow Lenin to finish speaking. In the wake of this mainstream social-democratic endorsement of "defensive warfare", Litvinov along with the rest of the exiled Bolsheviks in western Europe remained an outspoken public opponent of the war.
In England, Litvinov met and in 1916 married Ivy Low, the daughter of a Jewish university professor.
Diplomatic career
First Soviet representative to Britain On 8 November 1917, a day after the October Revolution, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) appointed Maxim Litvinov as the Soviet government's plenipotentiary representative in the United Kingdom.Haslam, Jonathan (1983) Soviet Foreign Policy, 1930–33: The Impact of the Depression. New York: St. Martin's Press. pp. 11–13. His accreditation was never officially formalised and his position as an unofficial diplomatic contact was analogous to that of Bruce Lockhart, Britain's unofficial agent in Soviet Russia. Litvinov was allowed to speak freely, even after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which took Russia out of the war.
In January 1918, Litvinov addressed the Labour Party Conference, praising the achievements of the Revolution. Alexander Kerensky, second and last leader of the republican Russian Provisional Government that had been previously installed after the abdication of the Tsar and was in turn overthrown by Lenin, was welcomed by the British government on a visit to London and also addressed the Labour Party Conference, criticising the dictatorship and repression of Lenin's government. Litvinov replied to Kerensky in the left-wing English press, criticising him as being supported by foreign powers and accused him of trying to restore Tsarism.
A mutiny took place in February 1918 on a Russian ship in the River Mersey. The police, having been warned of possible trouble, had the ship under surveillance. When shouts that the crew were threatening to kill their officers were heard, the ship was boarded and the crew were arrested. Shortly before the mutiny, a police report confirmed Litvinov had received the sailors very well. Litvinov had not tried to dissuade the sailors from carrying out the mutiny or to condemn it, and may have encouraged it.Holroyd-Doveton, p. 26 Litvinov also sought interviews with British, American, Australian and Canadian soldiers, and inculcated them with Bolshevik ideas, as well as inducing British and American soldiers of Jewish descent to carry on propaganda in their regiments. On one occasion, thirty Royal Engineers, along with some American and Canadian soldiers, were received in Litvinov's office.
At the end of 1917, Litvinov had secured the release of Georgy Chicherin from Brixton prison, but in September 1918, the British government arrested Litvinov, ostensibly for having addressed public gatherings held in opposition to British intervention in the ongoing Russian Civil War. Litvinov was held until he was exchanged for R.H. Bruce Lockhart, who had been similarly imprisoned in Russia.
Following his release, Litvinov returned to Moscow, arriving there at the end of 1918. He was appointed to the governing collegium of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel) and immediately dispatched on an official mission to Stockholm, Sweden, where he presented a Soviet peace appeal. Litvinov was subsequently deported from Sweden but spent the next months as a roving diplomat for the Soviet government, helping to broker a multilateral agreement allowing the exchange of prisoners of war from a range of combatants, including Russia, the UK and France. This successful negotiation amounted to de facto recognition of the new revolutionary Russian government by the other signatories to the agreement and established Litvinov's importance in Soviet diplomacy.
Litvinov tried to intervene in Britain's internal politics, agreeing to the request of the Daily Herald, a newspaper supporting the Labour Party, to ask the Soviet government for financial assistance. In view of the publicity caused by a leak in The Times, the Daily Herald did not accept the money.
Irish contacts and the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement In February 1921, the Soviet government was approached by the government of the unilaterally declared Irish Republic in Dublin with proposals for a treaty of mutual recognition and assistance. Despairing of early American recognition for the Irish Republic, President of the Dáil Éireann Éamon de Valera had redirected his envoy Patrick McCartan from Washington to Moscow. McCartan may have assumed Litvinov, with his Irish experience, would be a ready ally. Litvinov, however, told McCartan the Soviet priority was a trade agreement with the UK.
In March 1921, the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement, authorising trade between the two countries so gold sent to Britain to pay for goods could not be confiscated, was signed but the British government and the British press began to complain about Moscow-directed subversion. In June, the British government published a proposed treaty between the Dáil government and the Soviets, and related correspondence; the question of Communist intrigue in the Irish War of Independence made headlines.