Between the Revolution and the West: A Political Biography of Maxim M. Litvinov

This is the first complete biography of Maxim Litvinov, a Bolshevik revolutionary who began his professional life running guns into Tsarist Russia and eventually became the leading Soviet diplomat in the turbulent 1930s. His was a spectacular career, spanning some of the most dramatic decades of the twentieth century and including an unsuccessful effort to contain Hitler with the cooperation of the Western Allies. Litvinov’s subsequent replacement as Soviet foreign minister by Molotov in 19...