DENIAL OF RESIGNATION

Taranaki Daily News, 13 April 1928, Page 7

DENIAL OF RESIGNATION

TCHITCHERIN RETAINS OFFICE. By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright. A. and N.Z. Moscow, April 11. The Soviet, denying the report of Tchitcherin’s resignation, says it came from the same source as the Trotsky reports. A message sent from Riga yesterday said confirmation had been received from Moscow of a report that the Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Tchitcherin, had resigned owing to ill-health. The Communists were reported to have chosen Assistant-Commissar Litvinoff to succeed Tchitcherin. Georgi Tchitcherin, who is 56 years of age, was born at Kagaul near Tamboff. Curiously enough he was a member of the Russian nobility. He began his career in the Russian Foreign Office but resigned and joined the Socialists, at the time renouncing his claim to large estates he had inherited. Deported from Paris in 1915 he went to live in London, where, after the October revolution of 1917, he turned to Bolshevism. He returned to Russia to succeed Trotsky as Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Tchitcherin is not impressive jn figure or in manners. He is careless in dress, polite, but hesitating in conversation and no orator. Nevertheless, he is the only European Foreign Minister who has" survived eight difficult years which followed the war. As the protagonist of Bolshevism in its struggle with the other Powers, he has not hesitated to use the methods of the old diplomacy, but his language toward his opponents has often been frankly abusive. On cne occasion when treated by Lord Curzon with hauteur he reminded that Minister that “the Tchitcherins are of more ancient lineage than the Curzons.” His task has been to reconcile the policy of the destruction of capitalism with the borrowing from the prospective victims of the money necessary to keep the Soviet going until its aim has been achieved. He is hostile to the League of Nations because he sees in it the consolidation of European capitalism and because all his efforts to bring Germany into the Russian fold have definitely failed with her admission to the Geneva organisation. Maxim Litvinoff, who was suggested as Tchitcherin’s successor, is a Jew whose real name is Meyer Wallach. He was born in Russia in 1876, banished to Siberia in 1901, escaped to Paris, and came into touch with Lenin. After living in London under various aliases he returned and lived in Leningrad on a German passport under the name of Gustave Graf.

In 1906 he was concerned in a train robbery near Tiflis, after which his band murdered a military convoy. In consequence Litvinoff fled to Paris, where he was arrested, but he declared his action had been merely political. Ho was expelled from Paris and went to London, where he married a niece of Sir Sidney Low, the famous author, and as "Mr. Harrison” travelled for Russian fams, did some journalistic work, and was for a time an architectural draughtsman. During the war he was charged with being a German spy in London.- In January, 1918, he was appointed official representative of the Soviet Government in London, where he became active in promoting strikes, for which he was committed to prison and afterwards expelled from the country. He is described as conceited, overbearing and unscrupulous, contriving always to be somewhere else in a crisis, clever in address, and with considerable ability in setting forth Bolshevik international policy.