Mr. Wallach Goes to Washington

. . . England and the United States of America, said Stalin, possess elementarily democratic liberties. There exist there trade unions for workers and employes. There are workers' parties and there is Parliament. . . .

Diplomatically, Russia and the democracies had come a pleasurable full circle. Franklin Roosevelt had squinted up his eyes, looked all the way across at darkest Russia, and had seen a church; Joseph Stalin squinted back and saw a picket line. In response to this recognition, the Soviet Foreign Commissariat appointed as Ambassador to the U.S. none other than Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff, the bourgeois Communist, torchbearer for disarmament, handmaiden of collective security.

The circle began in the '20s. Maxim Litvinoff, who had married a plump, middle-class Englishwoman, set out to end the isolation which the Bolshevist Revolution had imposed on Russia. He delighted and confounded Englishmen with his bluntness, his cunning, his tenacity. At the Disarmament Conference in 1927 he surprised everyone by demanding, of all things, disarmament. "Propaganda," the delegates muttered. "It is propaganda," agreed Litvinoff. "Propaganda for peace." His pet idea was security for Russia through nonaggression. He gave and got promises to and from most of Russia's neighbors not to aggress.

But as World War II approached, Russia withdrew into an isolation even deeper than the previous one. Maxim Litvinoff resigned from the Foreign Commissariat and his successor made the marriage of convenience with Germany. Russia began to aggress, Britain and the U.S. to object. To Russia, Britain and the U.S. became known as the imperialist nations.

When the German attack on Russia swung the country out into the open again, convenience demanded friendship with the U.S. Convenience demanded that a more popular figure than Ambassador Constantine Oumansky talk bourgeois turkey to the men at the arsenal. The probability of a long war demanded that he be a shrewd enough man to retain his popularity without sacrificing his ends. And so, with mutual felicitations as to God, the Hammer & the Sickle, Maxim Litvinoff, whose name at birth was Max Wallach, set out for Washington.

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