RUSSIA: The Other Face

He was born Meer Genokh Moiseevich Vallakh, the son of a Jewish bank clerk in Polish Russia. On police dockets of Czarist Russia and most of the countries of Europe, he was many aliases—Ludwig Nietz, Maxim Harrison, David Mordecai, Felix. To Lenin, Stalin and the other Old Bolsheviks, he was Papasha (papa dear), one of the trusted inner circle. The rest of the world got to know him as Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff. For two confusing decades, he was one of Russia's two faces —the false one.

His early years fitted him for the...

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