Tough Baby from Moscow

(See Cover)

The nation's greatest concern was far across the seas. Russia must not be allowed to fall if U.S. aid can prevent it. Russia's fall would turn loose on Asia and Africa a terrific Nazi army, an army of millions of men, thousands of planes and thousands of tanks, an army big enough to fight on a 2,000-mile front--as it is now doing.

That was why last week U.S. eyes & ears were fixed on that great stretch of unknown land thousands of miles away; a land few Americans had ever seen, and whose place names few Americans could pronounce. On the reaches of Russia, from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea, World War II would be very nearly decided. Ahead lay six months of good military weather. In those six months probably lay the great decisions of the 20th Century.

Throughout the United Nations, suspense mounted. All winter long, retreating here & there, Hitler and his troops had endured, had waited, had piled up strength for the decisive battle. Now spring spread northward in ever-widening circles (see map). The zero hour was hard by. Hitler had feinted with one of the "peace offensives" which are always his last step before war of nerves turns to war of gunpowder (see p. 29).

Only days, hours, minutes of this ticking silence--and the blow would fall in the greatest cataclysm of blood and steel the world had ever borne.

Hitler has to destroy the Russian Army in 1942 or lose the war. And the U.S. has to keep Russia fighting or face a war that will be immeasurably longer and tougher.

Man & Job. In the big, elegant greystone Embassy on Washington's 16th Street, Russian Ambassador Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff (pronounced Lit-VEEN-off) heard the seconds tick. Watching the dogwood bloom on the lawn, he could picture the Russian spring: no Russian, however far from his homeland, can forget the feathery pastels of white birch and oak, the woods alive with the calls of the zhavornok and the drozd, the heady smell of mushrooms and flowers sprouting in soil musty-damp from the winter's snow.

May, Litvinoff remembered, is Russia's most beautiful month. In the south, the cherries and peaches ripen; the rich black loam of the Ukraine bakes from mud to dust; on the Central Front, around Moscow, the spongy forest land is thick with violets and lilies-of-the-valley, and the cuckoo and nightingale sing.

This year the Russian spring is a threat, not a promise. The sun drying out the mud ever farther north unrolled a great firm highway for the Nazi war machine. Maxim Litvinoff could guess at the pattern of the Nazi drive: this time, probably, Hitler would smash south, toward the oil of the Caucasus, the Suez Canal, the Indian Ocean. At the same moment the Japanese, with perhaps 1,000,000 men in Manchukuo, their railroads fanned out to the Siberian border, might smash at Russia's Asian end. This was Russia's crucial hour.

Litvinoff, six months out of Russia, knew his nation was still confident, as it had been even when the Nazis battered at Moscow's gates and the whole world thought Russia crushed He could ponder Joseph Stalin's new order of the day to the Russian Army (see p. 26), loaded with assurance that Russia had grown stronger, Germany weaker.

But Maxim Litvinoff's job was to assume the worst, to get all the aid he could wangle from the United Nations. The nearsighted little man who had fought his way up from a bookkeeper's job in a factory to a rank among the first-line diplomats of the century knew that in no fight is the fighter's strength enough.

Only a global pincers movement could cut off Russia from U.S. aid. But geography was with the Axis. The port of Vladivostok could be cut off by the Japs while the Nazi navy out of Trondheim cut the lifeline to Murmansk and Archangel. (Indeed the Germans claimed this week that they already had sunk, in an Arctic Ocean battle, a cruiser and six freighters of a convoy bound for Russia.) A successful Axis drive to the south would menace the only other route of aid: through the Persian Gulf and the Trans-Iranian Railroad.

Arrival in Chaos. But the jar-shaped little Russian was used to the darkness before dawn. His arrival in Washington was typical: he landed the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He and his white-haired, English-born wife had flown 20,000 miles in 24 days, were red-eyed from lack of sleep. Washington was in the turmoil of declaring war, black with the pessimism of Pearl Harbor; the Russian front was forgotten.

His mission got off to the worst possible start. He had come to get help for Russia. The tables were turned: the U.S. wanted help from Russia --specifically, a Russian bombing of Tokyo. Litvinoff rejected the demand --Russia was doing all she could; the bombing of Tokyo was only incidental anyway. Thus he argued.

He had traveled light and wired ahead for clothes; tailors met him at the Embassy with a stack of morning coats. The one that fit best fit terribly: the vest rumpled; the shoulders sagged; the trousers ran down to his shoes like water. But he pulled on the burlesque suit anyway and went right to work. He presented his credentials to President Roosevelt, saw Harry Hopkins and Secretary of State Hull. Quietly --and always to the right people --he argued why Russia could not help against Japan: Germany was enough for Russia to handle.

The U.S. distaste for Communism had bubbled furiously at the Russo-Nazi "NonAggression Pact," had boiled over during the Russo-Finnish War. Even after Russia and Germany were locked in life-&-death struggle many Americans suspected trickery somewhere. Now the Russian neutrality toward Japan could have disunited the United Nations. Thanks to Litvinoff, it did not: his arguments were realistic, the kind that hardheaded Americans could understand.

What Lend-Lease? U.S. aid-to-Russia, like most U.S. participation in the war before Pearl Harbor, had been mostly words. Harry Hopkins had flown to Moscow in the summer of 1941, had returned aflame. In the autumn the W. Averell Harriman mission followed; its members returned wide-eyed. At the time the Nazis were closest to Moscow, one missionary came back betting Moscow would never fall.

The U.S. and Britain promised arms shipments, told Stalin he need not hoard his strength for spring. Russia began its winter counter-attacks --but the help did not arrive.

What the missionaries had learned had not penetrated in Washington's bureaucracy. On the red-taped road someone would decide that a shipment of pursuit ships was more useful in the U.S.; someone would decide that a shipment of machine tools could wait a month. Actual shipments were barely started when came Pearl Harbor; then the Army & Navy cut them off entirely for a while. In February the U.S. was 50% behind on its great promise.

Last week the U.S. was still behind, but the gap was closing. Red tape had been cut; doubters had ceased doubting. The only important limit now was shipping.

Second Front. Russia wants all the materials she can get; the first front is more urgent than the second. But Russia also wants a second front to take the pressure off the first.

In his first radio address to the U.S. last February, Litvinoff appealed for a second front indirectly, half-humorously: Russia, long the world's stepchild, does not like to beg anything. Said Litvinoff: "We are proud that it has fallen to our lot to smash Hitler's war machine, but we by no means insist on exclusive rights."

Whether or not a second European front is opened, Britain's R.A.F., now augmented by U.S. pilots & planes, is aiding Russia by a second front in the air (see p. 25). More important: Washington is now as alive as London to the importance of all Russia's fronts.

Man & Circumstance. This shift in Washington opinion was not wrought by Maxim Litvinoff alone. Military logic backed him up.

Most British opinion flatly accepts it as a fact that Russia can and probably will fight Hitler to a standstill this summer; some think that Russia may even inflict outright defeat on the Nazis. U.S. military opinion is that neither Britain nor the U.S. has any accurate knowledge of Russia's military strength. Stalin, like the tough gambler that he is, plays his cards close to his chest, trusts no man, not even his new partners, with what is in his hand.

But the few U.S. military men who have glimpsed the Russian Army admire it--not for its cooperation with its Allies but for the opposite reason: the Russians are thoroughly tough babies who know how to take care of themselves. As such they are odd allies but a comforting kind of people to have fighting your enemy in a free-for-all.

But military logic does not always prevail, and Litvinoff has needed all his diplomatic skill, his shrewdness, his hard common sense. A great belly laugher with ideal physical equipment --he stands 5 ft. 3 and weighs 200 lb. --he gets along fabulously well with laugh-loving Franklin Roosevelt. He works well with Harry Hopkins. Vice President Henry Wallace, Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Justice Felix Frankfurter, Lend-Leaser Major General James H. Burns.

To the U.S. public, traditionally suspicious of striped-pants diplomats, he looks disarmingly undiplomatic. His roly-poly shape, bland face, crinkly eyes, thick spectacles and thinning grey hair give him the friendly air of a delicatessen-keeper. His accent sounds like purest ingenuous Brooklynese. He looks exactly like his Revolution-days nickname: Papasha--Little Papa.

Up From Hunger. Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff was not born to wear striped pants; he was not even born Litvinoff. He was Moysheev Vallakh, son of an obscure Jewish bank clerk in the drab, Russian-Polish factory town of Bialystok. Poverty and cruelty hung heavily over Bialystok's Jews. Moysheev was lucky: his father sent him to school until he was 18. After four years in the Tsarist Army he got a job as bookkeeper in Klintzy.

Inoculated early with the revolutionary spirit, he organized fellow workers into Marxist study groups, fled Klintzy a step ahead of the police. He went to Kiev, got a job in a leftist printing plant. At 22, one of the first of the Old Communists, he embarked on two decades of arrests, imprisonment, exile; was a familiar in the tense back-room plotting inside and outside Russia before the Revolution.

Jailed in Kiev as a radical, and sentenced to five years exile in Siberia, he escaped with eleven others by forming a human pyramid against the prison wall. He made his way to Zurich, there helped Nikolai Lenin publish the famed Communist newspaper Iskra (Spark), began a long career as underground messenger by smuggling the Spark into Russia. In the abortive Revolution of 1905 he smuggled arms. Once he leaped from a train to escape the police, wandered through woods for two days and nights in zero weather with a load of pistols in the lining of his fur greatcoat, nearly froze.

Always on the move as a courier of arms, money and propaganda, he had little use for his Party name of Litvinoff: he lived successively as Finkelstein, Felike, David Mordecai, Luvinye, M. G. Harrison, Gustav Graf. His missions were always dangerous--and he always brought them off; Lenin once wrote, "As long as Papasha is there we shall have transport."

From 1908 to 1918 he lived in London, worked as a clerk, draftsman, newspaper reporter, traveling salesman. He learned fluent English, married Ivy Low, left-wing writer, niece of a onetime Lord Mayor of London.

Unwanted Diplomat. When the Communists came into power in 1917, Litvinoff was appointed the first Soviet Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. It was a fine title, but empty; Britain refused to recognize him. His first diplomatic report to Moscow was written at the table of a cheap restaurant: "I wrote the other day to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asking for a meeting . . . but have not received any reply. . . ."

These were the days when newspapers all over the world pictured Russia's new leaders as demons with long beards and bombs in their pockets; Britain shipped unwanted Diplomat Litvinoff off to Moscow. There he served as an apprentice in the Foreign Commissariat. He was sent to Copenhagen to negotiate an international exchange of war prisoners and, although no Copenhagen hotel would take him as a guest, there he successfully wangled Soviet Russia's first treaties.

A doer and organizer, no theorist, Litvinoff was never a member of the inner Politburo which sets Soviet policy. But as Soviet Russia gained grudged admittance to the family of nations, he became its great spokesman in world affairs. He succeeded ailing Georgy Chicherin as Foreign Commissar, took Russia into the League of Nations. To Stalin, who has never been outside Russia, he was the interpreter of Western democracies. To the world he --was Russia's supersalesman.

Knee-Breeches Diplomat. In Moscow Litvinoff worked in a smock, lived with his family of four in a modest four-room apartment. Abroad he lived like any capitalist diplomat: addressed invitations in diplomacy's French, wore knee breeches at the coronation of Britain's King George VI. For all his pudgy homespun Little Papa appearance, he was a precisionist in foreign affairs, a diplomat's diplomat.

His diplomatic eccentricity was the blunt realism of his speech, often laced with sarcasm. At preliminaries to the Geneva Disarmament Conference, he shocked world diplomacy by pointing out that the way to disarm was simply to disarm. At a particularly sterile League of Nations session he congratulated delegates on "your decisive step backward." Diplomats who stressed punctilio, protocol and politesse were out of their class when they tangled with him.

Litvinoff made a popular splash in the diplomacy of the '30s; he backed every move to curb aggressions --German, Italian, Japanese --worked hard for treaties of collective security writh the democracies. But in a world afraid of Communism --with the democracies unwilling to be as tough as Russia was--he failed. So Stalin changed methods, signed up with the Nazis. Maxim Litvinoff, champion of collective security, foe of the Axis, "resigned."

The democracies thought Little Papa had been purged. Actually, Stalin was just being realistic--although for once Russian realism may have overreached itself --believing that Russia would emerge relatively stronger if Hitler concentrated on others for a time. In this period of phony peace, Litvinoff naturally stepped down.

"Disgrace" gave Litvinoff his first real vacation in 30 years. He browsed in the Lenin Institute library, watched his handsome daughter Tanya's dancing lessons, his handsome son Mischa's aviation lessons. He took up chess again, went to the mountains, walked the long walks which are the only exercise his feeble heart permits. When the Nazis invaded Russia he was ready to pick up where he had left off.

The Progress. Litvinoff aways hoped that the U.S. would burst its cocoon of isolationism and take a realistic view of the danger from the aggressor nations. To Joseph Emlen Davies, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia, he had expressed elation at President Roosevelt's 1937 "quarantine" speech, the first real crack in U.S. isolation; he shook his head when the U.S. tried to strengthen its neutrality by laws.

He won over Davies, the uncompromising capitalist, completely. Davies was one of the few Americans last year who really believed Russia would hold out. Said Joe Davies last week: "The only thing that matters right now is what Russia thinks of us. They are doing the fighting. If they are beaten back again this summer they can either hang on, keep a front against Germany, or they can make a peace --live to fight another day. Whether they will be disposed to make a peace or to hang on depends on what they think we are capable of doing against the Germans and for them. . . . It can mean either a continued front or no front against Hitler. . . ."

The Problems. Many problems fogged the air around Litvinoff's desk. Russian generals, going over Lend-Lease specifications, wondered why a big rich country could not send more aid, Why it had to wait for production lines to start moving. Members of the Russian mission, remembering how long and how thoroughly their own country had been stripped down for war, blinked at U.S. shop windows still full of metal automobile gadgets.

On the U.S. side (although a February FORTUNE poll showed only 4.4% of citizens against Lend-Lease to Russia) were the old suspicions, the old fear (now a tool of Axis propaganda) that a victorious Russia would be as bad as or worse than a Fascist Europe.

Russia can hardly be said to have opened her heart to the U.S. As when Stalin went secretly about his job of making war preparations on the scale that was able to hold the Nazis before Moscow, so now he takes aid from the U.S. without taking the U.S. into his confidence. The Russians have learned a lot about U.S. weapons and production; the U.S. has seen little of Russian armaments, and nothing of the front.

Under the circumstances there is no quid pro quo for the U.S. to open its heart or its plans to Russia. Litvinoff does not ask that. But there is another basis for U.S.-Russian relations: this war is going to be won by nations that are tougher than Germany and Japan. If the U.S. is willing to be a tough guy it can play ball with tough Russia. Against a common enemy they can operate together with profit and yet each for himself.

That is what Litvinoff sensibly offers, a game as fair for one player as for another.

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