The Moscow Radio today announced the death of Maxim Litvinov, former Soviet Foreign Minister who was demoted in 1939 when he opposed the Stalin-Hitler pact. He was 75 years old.
The son of a Jewish merchant of Bialystock, where he was born, Litvinov became the second Foreign Minister of Soviet Russia and was instrumental in winning United States recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933. From 1941 to 1943 he served as Soviet Ambassador to Washington.
His real name was Meyer Wallach. He became a militant revolutionary in his early youth and later hid his personality under many aliases. His father wanted him to remain an Orthodox Jewish merchant in Bialystok, but Litvinov went to Kiev in 1901 where he was arrested by the Czarist police for running a clandestine printing plant. He was sentenced to five years deportation to Siberia, but after a year fled and went to London where for the first time he met Lenin and Trotsky.
In the following years Litvinov, still a revolutionary, became a business man. He married Iva Low, a member of the well known Low family in England, whose father was a prominent lawyer in London. He remained in England till 1918 when he was arrested and exchanged for Bruce Lockhart, well known “British agent” held in Moscow. Upon his arrival in Moscow he was named Assistant Commissar of Foreign Affairs, later becoming Foreign Commissar-a post he held till May, 1939.
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