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But the most likely explanation was that in the bluff and counter-bluff of present European diplomacy, Dictator Stalin was simply clearing the decks to be ready at a moment's notice to jump either way. Foreign Commissar Molotov, inexperienced in diplomacy, represents no fixed foreign policy. Chief claim to U. S. fame was his denunciation of Col. Charles A. Lindbergh as a "paid liar" for alleged slurs on Soviet aviation. Speaking German and French, he will still be able to talk turkey with the British-French "Peace Front." If these talks fail (as they were on the point of doing last week) he can turn to negotiations with the Dictators' front.
Whatever Comrade Litvinoff's retirement meant, Britain and France thought it was bad news. It was accepted as good news in a Germany which had not failed to notice that, in his last two or three big speeches, Fiihrer Hitler had dropped his usual tirade against the Bolsheviks. Whether it meant nothing or everything. Comrade Stalin had removed one of the smoothest, most accomplished actors from the world's diplomatic stage.
Aristocrat's Assistant. Maxim Maxi-movich Litvinoff cut his diplomatic eyeteeth in the service of the great Georgy Chicherin, aristocratic, Tolstoyan figure who grew up to be a Tsarist diplomat and later renounced his inheritance to become a hunted revolutionary. Chicherin—with Litvinoff as his Vice-Commissar—struggled in the early 1920s to break through the cordon sanitaire which French President Raymond Poincaré had tried to weld around hated Red Russia. The Soviet Union was not even permitted a seat in the spectators' gallery at the Versailles Peace Conference. Many a country refused to recognize it. Red diplomats were shunned everywhere as irresponsible madmen. When Chicherin made his first appearance at an international conference—in Genoa in 1922—he astonished other diplomats by being a polished, cultured scholar.
Chicherin destroyed his health trying to be a one-man Foreign Office. He retired in 1928, was Commissar in name only until 1930, died in 1936, was succeeded by his Vice-Commissar, a former newspaperman, corset salesman and revolutionary hold-up man who had begun his diplomatic career as the first Soviet Ambassador to Great Britain.
Although Comrade Litvinoff outwardly conformed to diplomatic precedent, his language at international powwows was at first considered distinctly bad form. Once, for instance, he threw diplomatic minnesingers off key by proposing—at a disarmament conference of all places—complete disarmament. At a fatuous session of the League of Nations he congratulated the Assembly for "your decisive step backwards." Of the now many times violated Briand-Kellogg Peace Pact he said: "Nothing will come of it." But Soviet Russia signed.