Maxim Litvinov

Origins and early life

Maxim Litvinov was born Meir Henoch Wallach-Finkelstein at Białystok on 17 July 1876, the son of Moses Wallach, a Jewish merchant of the Pale of Settlement, and he was a Jew all his life, never converting; the fact mattered greatly in the 1930s, when Nazi Germany refused to deal with him and denounced him as the Jew Finkelstein.

Work and career

He joined the Russian Social Democrats in 1898, was imprisoned, escaped, and spent the years before 1917 in exile in London, where he ran arms and money for the Bolsheviks and married the English writer Ivy Low. After the revolution he became the Soviet Union's first envoy in London and then, from 1930 to 1939, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. In that office he pursued a single line: because the Soviet Union could not survive a German war alone, it needed collective security with the Western democracies.

He negotiated the recognition of the USSR by the United States with Franklin Roosevelt in November 1933, brought the Soviet Union into the League of Nations in 1934 where he became its most eloquent advocate, and argued at Geneva for the principle that peace is indivisible, calling for common action against aggression in Manchuria, Ethiopia, Spain and Czechoslovakia. Stalin dismissed him in May 1939, replacing him with Molotov, in a change of course that opened the way to the pact with Hitler signed three months later; Litvinov's Jewish origin was understood at the time to be part of the reason.

He survived the purges that killed most of his ministry, was recalled in 1941 as ambassador to Washington, where he helped secure Lend-Lease aid, and was dismissed again in 1943. He died in Moscow on 31 December 1951.