Maxim Maximowitsch Litvinow

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Maxim Litvinov around 1920

Maxim Litvinov ( Russian Максим Максимович Литвинов , scientific. Transliteration Maksim Maksimovič Litvinov , actually Max (Meir) gelding , born July 5, jul. / 17th July  1876 greg. In Białystok , Congress Poland , Russian Empire ; † 31 December 1951 in Moscow ) was a Soviet revolutionary, foreign politician and diplomat. He was People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs from 1930 to 1939 and during World War IIAmbassador to the USA .

Before 1918

Litwinow was born in 1876 in Białystok, which at that time belonged to the Russian part of Poland , as Meir Henoch Mojszewicz Wallach-Finkelstein, son of a wealthy Jewish banking family. After attending the grammar school in Białystok, he served in the Russian army from 1893 to 1898 , he was stationed in Baku . It is possible that he met Josef Stalin in the Caucasus . Litvinov joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1898 and became a member of a party committee in Kiev in 1900 , but in 1901 the whole committee was arrested. After 18 months in prison, Litvinov led an escape of eleven inmates from a Kiev prison and lived in exile in Switzerland, where he was an editor for the Iskra newspaper . In 1903 he joined the Bolshevik wing of the RSDLP and returned to Russia, where he worked for the newspaper Novaya Schisn (New Life) in Saint Petersburg during the 1905 Russian Revolution .

In 1906 he had to go into exile for the second time and then worked in Western Europe until 1918, where he procured weapons and money for the Bolshevik movement. He worked with Leonid Krassin and Stalin, with whom he shared a room in Whitechapel in London in 1907 .

In London he worked for the International Socialist Bureau and had contact with Georgi Tschitscherin , Iwan Maiski , Fyodor Rotstein and Alexandra Kollontai , who later all played an important role in Soviet foreign policy. He also met his future wife Ivy Lowe here , whom he married in 1916. Sier later became known as a writer. She came from a wealthy Jewish family who had fled to England after the unsuccessful uprising in Hungary in 1848 . In 1907 he was appointed secretary of the social democratic delegation at the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart . In 1908 he was arrested for his illegal fundraising in Paris and later also in London. He had tried to exchange the money from the robbery on the Reichsbank in Tbilisi . In 1918 he was exchanged by the British government for the English consul Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart , imprisoned in Moscow, and expelled to Bolshevik Russia.

1918 to 1930

Litvinov entered the diplomatic service in Soviet Russia . He very quickly became a close collaborator and the right-hand man of the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs (Foreign Minister) Georgi Wassiljewitsch Tschitscherin and was primarily concerned with relations with the Western powers . In 1920/1921 he led the Soviet delegation in negotiations with Great Britain , which in March 1921 resulted in a trade agreement and de facto recognition of the Soviet Union by London. On August 20, 1921, in Riga , he signed a contract with the American Relief Administration , which set in motion aid deliveries because of the acute famine that had become acute that same year .

In 1923 Litvinov became deputy People's Commissar of the Soviet Union . In this position he took over the running of the day-to-day business more and more because of Chicherin's illness. Like Chicherin, he rejected the activities of the Comintern , which wanted to trigger revolutions in the capitalist states, and preferred to work realpolitically to improve their relations with the Soviet Union. In 1923, for example, in a sarcastic letter to Grigory Yevsejewitsch Zinoviev , he demanded that all Comintern agents be withdrawn from the Weimar Republic , the only important state in Europe that had reasonably good relations with the Soviet Union. In 1925 he wrote a letter similar to the charge d'affaires in Paris Shliapnikov whose Bolshevik rhetoric of improving relations with the Third French Republic in the way stood.

Litvinov's foreign policy was primarily aimed at establishing a system of collective security in East Central Europe. To this end, he strove to conclude non-aggression pacts with the neighboring countries of the Soviet Union . The first was the treaty with Lithuania , signed on September 28, 1926. On February 9, 1929, the Litvinov Protocol followed between the Soviet Union, Romania , Poland , Latvia and Estonia , which put the Briand-Kellogg Pact into force ahead of schedule to outlaw war.

1930 to 1939

On July 21, 1930 Litvinov succeeded Chicherin's People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. In this capacity he continued his policy of rapprochement with the Western Powers and the Little Entente . As part of this policy, the Soviet Union concluded non-aggression pacts with Finland (January 21, 1932), Latvia (February 5, 1932), Estonia (May 4, 1932), Poland (July 25, 1932), Italy (September 2, 1933) and France (November 29, 1932). A non-aggression pact with China followed on August 21, 1937 . This policy was intended to give the Soviet Union security from the capitalist powers with which it had to contend in the Polish-Soviet war and during the intervention of French, British, Japanese and American troops. Litvinov's focus changed in 1933 when relations with the German Reich deteriorated rapidly after the National Socialist seizure of power . In order not to be isolated internationally, he tried to improve relations with France. On September 18, 1934, the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations , which Soviet propaganda had until then reviled as the “command center of world imperialism ” - the Soviet Union even received a seat on its Permanent Council. On May 2, 1935, Litvinov signed the Treaty of Mutual Assistance between the Soviet Union and France . A few days later a similar treaty was signed with Czechoslovakia . Both treaties, however, linked a mutual assistance obligation to a previous League of Nations mandate and thus excluded an immediate military reaction. As a result, negotiations between the military structures of the two states did not take place. In addition, France refused in the negotiations to anchor a security guarantee for the Baltic states in this pact, which is why Litvinov, for his part , also withdrew the Soviet reciprocity offer to give a security guarantee for Belgium , Switzerland and the demilitarized Rhineland .

Universal Newsreel reports on Litvinov's visit to the United States in 1933

The aim of forming a coalition against Hitler was also devoted to an attempt to overcome the isolation of the Soviet Union and to achieve recognition of the Soviet Union as a state by the United States. After Franklin D. Roosevelt's predecessors had always refused recognition as president, Litvinov succeeded in recognizing the Soviet Union as a state in Roosevelt's first term, who saw the Soviet Union as a counterweight to Germany and Japan . After Litvinov met with Roosevelt's confidante Bernard Baruch in Vichy in July 1933, William C. Bullitt , Cordell Hull and Henry Morgenthau drafted a memorandum on the issue of recognition, which was followed by an exchange of letters between Roosevelt and Kalinin in October 1933 . Litvinov began his journey to the United States in October. On November 16, the Roosevelt and Litvinov negotiations were announced in Washington. The two states pledged not to interfere in each other's domestic politics. However, the repayment of debts, which had been an important reason for the non-recognition of the Soviet Union, was not regulated.

Measured against his goals, Litvinov's policy of rapprochement with the Western powers must be viewed as unsuccessful.

Litvinov was a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU from 1934 to 1941 , but he was not a member of the Politburo , which externally represented the center of power of the Soviet Union. He was Stalin's liaison with Roosevelt and Winston Churchill . Possibly this saved him from internal party "purges" e.g. B. during the time of the Great Terror .

Litvinov was deposed on May 3, 1939, and Vyacheslav Molotov , who had already been chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (head of government) from 1930 , was appointed Foreign Minister of the USSR. Molotov had to hold two offices until Stalin took over the government from him on May 7, 1941. Some historians see this primarily as Stalin's attempt to keep a back door open for negotiations with Germany in addition to the ongoing Soviet negotiations on a pact with the Western powers. Other historians come to the conclusion that Stalin viewed Litvinov's efforts to develop a system of collective security against the German Reich with the Western powers as a failure at this point in time. The line followed in the wake of Molotov finally led to the conclusion of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact shortly before the outbreak of World War II . After the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland , Litvinov (according to Willy Cohn's diary note ) became chairman of the Russian Exchange Commission in Krakow on December 7, 1939.

After 1939

In November 1941 he was appointed the new ambassador to Washington, where he arrived on December 7, the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor . On January 1, 1942, he signed the United Nations Declaration on behalf of the Soviet Union , which formed the basis of the anti-Hitler coalition , and a mutual aid agreement with the United States in June 1942. From 1942 to 1943 he also held the office of envoy in Cuba . In August 1943 he, like Iwan Maiski from London, was recalled from Washington to take over the post of deputy foreign commissioner.

He was involved in the preparation of the Moscow Foreign Ministers' Conference in October 1943, when the question of the territorial division of Germany after the war was discussed for the first time. In addition, he was appointed head of the ministry's special commission on post-war order and the preparation of peace treaties. On November 15, 1944, Litvinov submitted in a memorandum to the Commission that he was in favor of an understanding with Great Britain on the amicable delimitation of spheres of security in Europe, while at the same time wishing to limit the Soviet sphere of interest in Europe to the following countries: Finland, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Turkey and the Balkans.

After his 70th birthday in 1946, he retired; after a third heart attack , Maxim Maximowitsch Litvinow died in 1951 in the Kremlin hospital.

literature

  • John Holroyd-Doveton: Maxim Litvinov. A biography. Woodland Publications, 2013, ISBN 978-0-9572-9610-7 .
  • Hugh D. Phillips: Between The Revolution And The West. A Political Biography Of Maxim M. Litvinov . Routledge, New York 2019, ISBN 978-0-4297-1897-7
  • Albert Resis: The Fall of Litvinov. Harbinger of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact . In: Europe-Asia Studies 52, Heft 1 (2000), pp. 33–56.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Jabara Carley: Soviet foreign policy in the West, 1936-1941. A review article. In: Europe Asia Studies 56, Heft 7 (2004), pp. 1081–1100, here pp. 1082 f.
  2. ↑ Aleksandr Cubarjan: The USSR and the beginning of the Second World War. In: Klaus Hildebrand , Jürgen Schmädeke and Klaus Zernack (eds.): 1939 - On the threshold of the world war: The unleashing of the Second World War and the international system . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-11-012596-X , p. 279 and others.
  3. ↑ Viktor Iščenko: [Introduction: Treaty of Mutual Assistance between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Republic of France, May 2, 1935]. 1000dokumente.de , accessed April 19, 2020.
  4. ↑ Michael Jabara Carley: "Who Betrayed Whom? Franco-Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1932-1939", p. 6 ff; Was there a Stalin-Hitler pact? - Free University of Berlin, Berlin, conférence, février 2014 . ( academia.edu [accessed October 24, 2018]).
  5. ↑ Donald Gordon Bishop: The Roosevelt-Litvinov Agreements: The American View , p. 253 (FN 33 and 34)
  6. ↑ Michael Jabara Carley: "Who Betrayed Whom? Franco-Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1932-1939", p. 13; Was there a Stalin-Hitler pact? - Free University of Berlin, Berlin, conférence, février 2014 . ( academia.edu [accessed October 24, 2018]).
  7. ↑ Michael Jabara Carley: "Who Betrayed Whom? Franco-Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1932–1939," Was there a Stalin-Hitler pact? February 2014, p. 13 ( academia.edu [accessed October 24, 2018]).
  8. ^ The big three after World War II, Washington 1995, p. 10 f.

Web links

Commons : Maxim Litvinow  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files
predecessor Office successor
Grigory Chicherin Soviet Foreign Minister
1930–1939 		Vyacheslav Molotov
personal data
SURNAME Litvinov, Maxim Maximowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Max Meier Wallach
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Soviet revolutionary, foreign politician and diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Białystok
DATE OF DEATH December 31, 1951
Place of death Moscow