Maxim Maksimovich Litvinov

Maxim Litvinov was born Meir-Henoch Wallach, the son of a Jewish merchant in Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898 and ran an underground printing press for the Kyiv Committee in 1900. Arrested in 1901, he helped organize and personally took part in the dramatic 1902 escape of eleven 'Iskra-ists' from Kyiv's Lukyanivska Prison. Fleeing to Switzerland, he became the agent responsible for smuggling the Iskra newspaper back into Russia. During the 1905 Revolution, he set up a special bureau in Paris with Kamo and other Caucasian comrades to purchase and deliver arms to revolutionary organizations. That summer he arranged for the British steamer John Grafton to deliver weapons near Tallinn, but the ship ran aground. In 1906, with the help of Macedonian revolutionary Naum Tyufekchiev, he shipped a large arms consignment to Varna on the Black Sea. But a storm beached the yacht and Romanian fishermen made off with the cargo. Only the failed operations are recorded; how many shipments actually got through remains unknown. In 1908 he was arrested in France for trying to exchange banknotes stolen in Kamo's Tiflis expropriation and was deported. He spent the next decade in London, serving as secretary of the Bolshevik group there. After the October Revolution he became Soviet Russia's first diplomatic representative to Britain. But in September 1918 the British arrested Lockhart's Bolshevik contact, Litvinov, in retaliation for the Bolshevik arrest of British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart in Moscow. Litvinov spent ten days in Brixton Prison. A month later, the two men were exchanged: the first spy swap in Soviet diplomatic history.

In 1921 Litvinov was appointed First Deputy People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs, second in command to Commissar Georgy Chicherin (1872–1936). The two were temperamental opposites and became rivals: Chicherin held strongly anti-Western views and sought to keep Soviet Russia aloof from deal-making with the capitalist powers, while Litvinov, in the assessment of diplomatic historian Jonathan Haslam, was less erudite but willing to deal in good faith with the West. On the Anglo-Soviet track before 1930, in February 1921 Litvinov told Irish envoy Patrick McCartan that the Soviet priority was a trade agreement with the United Kingdom rather than recognition of the Irish Republic; the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was signed that March. He answered Lord Curzon's protest note of 7 September 1921 by calling its sources 'a gang of professional forgers and swindlers', and after the 1927 Arcos raid and the Conservative government's severance of diplomatic relations he issued a defiant statement, whereas Chicherin advocated caution.

From 30 November 1927 he actively attended the League of Nations Disarmament Preparatory Commission until it was replaced by the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1932, initially advocating total disarmament; answering Paul-Boncour's objection, he argued that small nations would not be less secure after their powerful neighbours disarmed. The Labour Party, PLP and TUC joint council passed a resolution stressing the importance of the Soviet delegation's 30 November 1927 general-and-simultaneous disarmament proposals. Litvinov favoured Soviet participation in the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, opposite to the position of his nominal superior Chicherin, and, frustrated by the failure of signatories to ratify, proposed what became known as the Litvinov Protocol, by which the signatories proclaimed mutual compliance with the pact's goals; it was signed in Moscow in February 1929 by the USSR, Poland, Romania, Latvia and Estonia, and later by several other countries.

In this phase Litvinov pressed for limited cooperation with the capitalist powers within the framework of disarmament and treaty commitments. The attribution details for the period, such as Haslam's characterisation and the rivalry with Chicherin, would still benefit from corroboration against studies such as Phillips, Between the Revolution and the West (1992).

Litvinov's diplomacy in the 1930s is summed up in two words: collective security. At the League of Nations he championed an anti-fascist coalition of the non-aggressor states, and in 1933 he secured US-Soviet diplomatic recognition. The 1935 mutual assistance pacts with France and Czechoslovakia marked the zenith of this line. But on 3 May 1939 Stalin dismissed Litvinov and installed Molotov as Foreign Commissar. Litvinov was Jewish; his removal signaled that Moscow was now open to negotiations with Berlin: the Nazi regime would not talk to a 'Jewish foreign minister.' Three months later came the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Litvinov's dismissal was itself the signal of a fundamental reorientation of Soviet foreign policy.