MAXIM LITVINOV AS STALIN’S JEWISH CARD

In my entry Stalin, FDR, And Harpo Marx in the Twilight section, I told the story of how Stalin was supposedly humiliated by FDR’s caricaturistic brainstorm of appointing the popular Jewish-American comedian Harpo Marx as a virtual opposite number to Stalin’s Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, equally Jewish. The joke had several subtleties in it, including the fact that Harpo and Litvinov even kind of looked alike, and that of course the name Marx was not accidental in this “equation,” either.

The question whether Stalin’s decision to appoint Litvinov as the USSR’s ‘Jewish face to the world’ was an oversight, or a deliberate ploy, is an important one. Stalin’s mistakes were extremely rare, particularly in all matters which required thoughtful deliberation. Very often in his political career what looked like a mistake at first would turn out into a hidden advantage. Like a good chess player, Stalin was always prepared to lure his opponents into a game of his own choosing, by a clever gambit where he would lose some now, in order to reap a richer harvest in the long run.

Let us remember that Moscow’s Jewish Card did n0t originate with Georgi Arbatov’s stunningly simple, yet devilishly ingenious dictum (which I have quoted and explored on several occasions already) that American Jews would feel much more at home with a Soviet Jew than with an American Gentile, and that this critical weakness could be well exploited by Moscow. Stalin, too, knew how to play the Jewish Card. In his mind the Soviet Socialist state was facing the world’s capitalist monolith (we are talking about 1930 when he already anticipated Hitler but saw the imminent Soviet-German confrontation as the end product of an international capitalist conspiracy), and, having associated capitalism with the Jews, he was ready to play his own Jewish card against them, as if anticipating the future Arbatov rationale.

In this line of thinking, Stalin would not mind that much being the butt of FDR’s joke, as he was obviously aware of the animus existing between FDR and the American Jewish community, made conspicuously explicit by FDR’s Inaugural Address on March 4^th, 1933. (See my entry FDR And The Villains Of The Great Depression, posted on this blog on June 18^th, 2011, as part of the composite entry War And Peace Of FDR.) It was good enough for Stalin that American Jews could not have liked FDR’s joke at their expense. At the same time, Stalin was counting on Maxim Litvinov, with his distinctive Yiddish features, arousing empathy among the American Jews, and if Harpo Marx got involved in the game, the more, the merrier…

When in 1939 Stalin entered an uneasy deal with Nazi Germany, postponing the inevitable war for as long as it could be postponed (about this, by all means, see my entry The Stalin-Hitler Pact, posted on February 18^th, 2011!), he put Litvinov out of sight, but then, in 1941, after the war with Germany had started, he sent him as Soviet Ambassador to the United States, dismissing him again in 1943, for a different reason: Litvinov’s abject failure to sweet-talk Washington into opening the Second Front in Europe.