Soviet Press Praises Litvinoff, New Foreign Affairs Commissar

In connection with the appointment of Maxim Litvinoff as Soviet commissar for foreign affairs the Moscow papers today are full of biographical material about him. The stories are replete with tales of his arrests, escapes, exile, his revolutionary background and other dramatic incidents in his long career as a Bolshevik.

The papers are especially recalling the story of his arrest while he was the Soviet ambassador in England in 1918 and his subsequent exchange for the English consul-general in Moscow, G. Lockhart. A good deal is also being made of his connection with the Yaroslavl uprising in 1918.

In enumerating his varied diplomatic activities for the Soviet Union the papers characterize his diplomatic career as splendid and point out that his victories in “international tournaments” are many. His appointment as commissar for foreign affairs is really no change in his work for he has been the acting commissar for almost two years.

M. Litvinoff has had a long career as a Bolshevist and Soviet diplomat, having joined the Communist party in 1893. For many years he lived in exile, mainly in Great Britain to which country he returned as ambassador in 1918. From 1918-1919 he was a member of the Collegium Commission for Foreign Affairs and of the Commission for State Control. In 1920 he was Soviet minister to Esthonia. He was a delegate to the Genoa Conference and headed the Soviet delegation to the Hague Conference of 1922. He was chairman of the Moscow Disarmament Conference in 1923 and was chief of the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations preparatory disarmament Conference in 1928.