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The Elusive Litvinov Memoirs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2017

Elena S. Danielson
Elena S. Danielson*
Affiliation:
Hoover Institute Archives
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Extract

Conflicting accounts about the autobiographical writings of Soviet Foreign Minister Maksim Litvinov have circulated for decades. Some of the confusion can be clarified by an examination of the correspondence of his British wife Ivy Low Litvinov. On 7 December 1941, when Litvinov arrived in Washington, D.C., as the new Soviet ambassador, he was accompanied by Ivy. The American Left, which had lionized him during his previous United States visit to negotiate recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933, welcomed both Litvinovs with high enthusiasm in the 1940s. In the United States for the first time, she renewed acquaintance with various American intellectuals, whom she had met over the years in Moscow. Among them was the writer Joseph Freeman, one of the editors of the radical communist journal New Masses.

Ivy wrote frequently from her embassy quarters in Washington to Freeman, her closest confidant, who lived in New York. Those letters that have been preserved provide a sense of Maksim Litvinov's tenuous position as a diplomat, indispensable for negotiating with the west but also unmanageable within the Soviet leadership.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , Fall 1989 , pp. 477 - 483
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1989

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References

1. Stephen, John J., “A Soviet Commissar's Visit to Pearl Harbor,” Honolulu Slur Bulletin , 4 December 1987.Google Scholar

2. Joseph Freeman collection, box 175, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, Calif.; additional material is in the Ivy Litvinov collection, donated in 1987 to the Hoover Institution Archives by Tatiana Litvinov. I am indebted to Tatiana Litvinov for permission to quote from the papers of her parents and for her unfailing assistance in the research for this essay.

3. Freeman, box 175, letter from Ivy Litvinov to Joseph Freeman, 20 January 1943. The original spelling, punctuation, and syntax of the letters have been preserved.

4. Carswell, John, The Exile: A Life of Ivy Litvinov (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 84 Google Scholar. Tatiana Litvinov, letter to the author, 18 December 1987. Tatiana remembers Ivy giving Ihe fragment to Aleksandra Kollontai.

5. Ivy Litvinov, box I, transcripts of oral history conducted by Manya Harari, in England, 1960. (NB: Access to the oral history transcripts is restricted at the request of the donor until 1990.)

6. Pope, Arthur Upham, Maxim Litvinov (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1943), 72–77.Google Scholar A pamphlet-length biography was published by Kornev, N. Litvinov (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1936)Google Scholar. Zinovyi Sheinis completed a biography in 1966, of which several excerpts were published in 1968 and 1970.

7. Sir Lockhart, Robert Bruce, The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, Vol. 1, 1915–1938 , edited by Young, Kenneth (London: Macmillan, 1973), 270.Google Scholar

8. International Military Tribunal for the Far East, “Proceedings” (mimeographed transcript), 1946. 22,803. Reference is to the official Litvinov diary of 1938.

9. Dokumenty Vneshnei Politiki SSSR (Moscow: Gos. Izd. pol. lit., 1957-).

10. Ivy Litvinov, box 1, oral history transcript.

11. Freeman, box 175.

12. Pope, Litvinoff. x.

13. Norman, Dorothy, Encounters: A Memoir (New York: Harcourt, 1987), 167.Google Scholar

14. Ivy Litvinov, box 1, oral history transcripts.

15. Ibid.

16. Freeman, box 175.

17. Freeman, box 175, memorandum, 5 January 1946.

18. Freeman, box 175, Maksim Litvinov to Ivy Litvinov, 5 August 1943. The letter is written on stationery that he saved from Camp Topridge, Joseph Davies's retreat in Franklin County, New York. Ivy wrote that at the camp they lived not “in the lap, but the very womb of luxury,” according to a letter to Freeman, box 175.

19. Ivy Litvinov, unorganized portion of the papers.

20. Freeman, box 175, memorandum of 5 January 1946, and undated letter from Ivy Litvinov to Freeman ca. December 1945.

21. Freeman, memorandum, ibid.

22. Carswell, The Exile. 162.

23. lunost', 1946.

24. George Kennan, private communication, 13 March 1989.

25. Bertram Wolfe collection, Hoover Institution Archives, typescript dated 22 July 1953. The analysis in this manuscript was published in three versions: Bertram Wolfe, “Adventures in Forged Sovetica,” New Leader, 11 August 1955; “The Case of the Litvinov Diary,” Encounter, January 1956; and Wolfe, Bertram “The Strange Case of Litvinov's Diary,” in Strange Communists I Have Known (New York: Stein and Day. 1965), 207–222.Google Scholar

26. Bessedovsky, Grigory, Revelations of a Soviet Diplomat (London: Norgate, 1931).Google Scholar

27. Jonathan Haslam, private communication. August 1987.

28. Bertram Wolfe collection, Joseph Freeman to Bertram Wolfe, 15 August 1955.

29. Ivy Litvinov, box 1, oral history transcripts, contains the most complete available primary source on Ivy's interview about the memoirs.

30. Ibid. I would greatly appreciate hearing from anyone with information about manuscripts by Ivy and Maksim Litvinov. Communications may be sent to Elena S. Danielson, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.