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The year of his greatest triumphs was 1933, when he walked away from the otherwise still-born World Economic Conference in London with the embryo of U. S. recognition of the U.S.S.R. The same year he embarked on a series of non-aggression pacts with every Soviet neighbor except Japan. Scared by Adolf Hitler's "if-I-had-the-Ukraine" line of chatter, he played the game of collective security for all it was worth throughout the dictators' aggressions in Ethiopia, Spain, Austria. Last autumn, the Czecho-Slovak crisis found him again at Geneva proposing joint British-French-Russian action to save the Czechs.
At Home. In foreign capitals Litvinoff rode around in a shiny limousine with a tiny red flag attached, stayed at luxurious hotels, ate fine foods, drank good wines, dressed like the traditional diplomat. At home he made no such concessions to bourgeois tastes. He lived in a modest flat with his English-born wife and two handsome children. But Ivy Low Litvinoff, the Soviets' No. 1 hostess, conducted the only Moscow salon and translated novels and plays in her spare time. Fun-loving, witty, bohemian, she once engaged Novelist Theodore Dreiser in a conversation on his specialty, sexual theory, and left him blushing and speechless. Her most famous parties were in the purple splendor of the
Commissar's official mansion, where she was inclined to talk just a little too much for a diplomat's wife. Result was that soon Comrade Ivy was reported as having "moved" to Sverdlovsk, in the Ural Mountains, some 900 miles east of Moscow, where she was following her big hobby of teaching "basic English"—some 850 "essential" English words—to young Russians. Mme Litvinoff was brought back to Moscow for big social functions of the Foreign Commissariat. Last autumn, however, at the usual Soviet reception to diplomats the invitations were written simply in the name of the Foreign Commissar, omitted the usual mention of Mme Litvinoff.
Leaf. If any Moscow foreign correspondent last week knew the whereabouts of Comrade Litvinoff, he did not report it, even though the Soviet Union had suddenly abolished the long practice of censoring newsmen's outgoing despatches. When Adolf Hitler wants to say something really important he convenes his Reichstag. Foreign correspondents last week wondered whether Comrade Stalin was not taking a leaf from the Hitler notebook when there was summoned to meet on May 25 the U.S.S.R. Parliament, the All-Union Congress of Soviets. Last time the Congress met was last August during the fighting between Japan and the Soviet Union at Changkufeng.