Heave-Ho for Jake

In a righteous and indignant note, the U.S. State Department told Russia last week that it had had enough of Jacob Lomakin, its consul general in New York City.* The U.S. was going to send him home; it could no longer tolerate the kind of hooliganism that had marked his conduct of the Kasenkina affair (TIME, Aug. 16-23). For a week the world's spotlight was fixed on Lomakin, a typical Soviet public servant.

Chore Boy. Jake Lomakin began going places in 1939. He had graduated from a Moscow technical school as a "management engineer," had written articles on Marxist economy, and taken a course on how to become a foreign correspondent. In 1939, when he was 35, Jake was sent to New York as a Tass correspondent. Two years later he was made vice consul in New York City, and a year later, consul general in San Francisco.

Jake was an apt, ambitious and obedient young man who never shirked a chore, even to kidnaping a Russian sailor

Two years later he was back in the U.S. as one of Andrei Gromyko's chief advisers in U.N. One of Jake's jobs was on the Subcommission on Freedom of Information and of the Press, where he surprised reporters by his jolly manner, so unlike Gromyko's icy front.

Meanwhile he had also become consul general in New York City, a job second in importance only to that of ambassador. Jacob had certainly made good. In fact, there was no telling where he might have gone if Oksana Stepanovna Kasenkina, the schoolteacher, had not jumped out of the third-floor window of his consulate.

"They Are Coming." Jake had only tried to do his duty--Russian style. He had brought Mrs. Kasenkina back from Countess Tolstoy's New York farm and held her incommunicado at the consulate. After she had jumped, Jake concocted one story. Then last week he tried another story. Mrs. Kasenkina had seen "a crowd running from the Hotel Pierre towards the consulate," he said, and it had frightened her. He said she was depressed by the "malicious fabrications" of the U.S. press and overwrought by "threats of the United States police" to haul her into court "by force." Mrs. Kasenkina had already said from her hospital bed that she had jumped to escape Jake.

"Gross Violation." The State Department note rejected three separate Soviet government complaints, which were based, said the note, on misinformation supplied by Jake. "Consul General Lomakin's conduct constitutes an abuse of the prerogatives of his position and a gross violation [of diplomatic standards] ... It is requested that he leave the United States."

At Roosevelt Hospital Mrs. Kasenkina exclaimed: "Good! Good!"

Said the New York Daily News, in U.S. idiom which no doubt would fascinate Jake: "This demand that Lomakin be jerked the hell out of here should have a wholesome effect on the overlords of the Kremlin . . ."

*The State Department also refused to let Dr. Hewlett Johnson, the "Red Dean" of Canterbury enter the U.S. to make a lecture tour under the auspices of the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship. Such a visit is "not in our national interest," said the Department spokesman. who had jumped a Soviet ship. Jake sent the sailor back to Russia. In 1944, Moscow called Jake back to become deputy chief of press relations in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. U.S. foreign correspondents remembered him as an approachable official with small blue eyes and a prominent chin who sometimes became quite garrulous when he drank too much. He was a baseball fan. He was fascinated by American slang. In his capacity as censor he sometimes held up copy to pore over and memorize U.S. idioms.

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