Caviar to Litvinoff

Elder J. P. Morgan partners ate their dinners elsewhere, but the firm sent young S. Parker Gilbert, whilom Agent General for Reparations, to a banquet at Manhattan's tall-towered Waldorf-Astoria last week for Comrade Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff.

No Cardinal or other Catholic prelate was present but the American Apostolic Church in America sent their chief prelate, and the big warm room buzzed with the voices of General Motors' Sloan, General Electric's Gerard Swope, Ford's Sorensen, Pennsylvania Railroad's Atterbury, Baldwin Locomotive's Houston, Thomas A. Edison's son Charles, Theodore Roosevelt's son Kermit, Owen D. Young, Henry Morgenthau Sr. and dowagers galore. As Comrade Litvinoff waddled in to take his place beneath the crossed Red Flag and Stars and Stripes the "Star-Spangled Banner" brought all to their feet and few sat down when the organ switched into the "Internationale."*

Cooper & Robins. Host at the banquet was genial Soviet-famed Engineer Col. Hugh L. Cooper as president of the American-Russian Chamber of Commerce. Guests paid $5.50 per plate for a dinner which included Beluga Caviar spread thin on toast./- Borsch (beet soup) and Filet of Beef Stroganoff. Guest Litvinoff said that Host Cooper's services "are already inscribed in the geography of the Soviet Union and endure in the concrete of Dnieprostroy" Dam, but he singled out as "probably the oldest friend of the Soviet Union in America" none other than that dramatic victim of amnesia, Col. Raymond Robins who wandered off among the mountains of North Carolina while en route to visit President Hoover (TIME, Sept. 19, 1932, et seq.). In Russia, where the Colonel headed a U. S. Red Cross mission in bloody 1917 and which he revisited on Red May Day 1933, Raymond Robins is known as a man of phenomenal memory, able to recall in minute detail his conversations with Nikolai Lenin and the events in Leningrad (then Petrograd) leading up to the creation of the Soviet Union.

"Colonel Robins," cried Comrade Litvinoff, "was the first to discern health and vitality in what other people believed to be a stillborn child!"

Propaganda & Charm. Humorously the Soviet Commissar described his conferences with President Roosevelt as "an effort to make some propaganda between us," adding with a twinkle "President Roosevelt submitted me to a kind of religious propaganda, and I in my turn tried to persuade him of the soundness of certain principles in the will of a famous American, Stephen Girard, who thought it best to exclude all ecclesiastical activities from the college which he founded in Philadelphia. Although we hardly succeeded in convincing one another, I fully enjoyed the President's way of discussing things, and I still feel myself under the spell of his charm."

Disarmament? Getting down to business, M. Litvinoff. persistent spokesman for the Soviet Union's standing proposal of total disarmament for all nations, declared:

"It would be hard to find any one today still holding the belief that the World War was the last war. Preparations for a new war. or rather for new wars, are in full swing and are carried on quite openly. ... A characteristic of such militaristic training is the advancement of medieval, pseudo-scientific theories regarding the supremacy of some peoples over others. . . .

"It is not now a question whether all countries will accept the Soviet, American, French or British method of disarmament and control. . . . Let the [Disarmament] Conference put two simple questions to its members: Will they agree to any serious reduction of armaments and will they submit to any control? [see p. 16]. . . . Such an answer would be of decisive importance and would sound the death knell of the Conference and therefore perhaps Geneva will endeavor to avoid it."

"Ray of Light." Without mentioning Capitalism by name, Communist Litvinoff then turned his speech into a suave, polished, 100% Red enumeration of Capitalist failures and concluded with a dramatic understatement: "Against this gloomy background it is impossible, in my opinion, not to discern in all that is going on in my country a ray of light. ... I hope that ... I have not transgressed the limits permitted by my agreement with President Roosevelt regarding propaganda."

Red to Rome. Of all places Commissar Litvinoff chose the city of Pope Pius XI and of Benito Mussolini as his next destination. Just before sailing from Manhattan on the crack Italian liner Conte de Savoia he lost his hat twice in a wild melee of Communist sympathizers and autograph hunters, retrieved it a second time with the merry cry, ''Ah--at last I have caught your American tempo!"

Though his shirts are black, Dictator Mussolini extended the Royal Italian Government's recognition to the Soviet Union in 1924, has ever since been zealous in stimulating Soviet-Italian trade by economic treaty. Years ago Soviet samples appeared on the counters of all Italy's great trade fairs. Of Russia's system of government Il Duce has candidly remarked that it is ridiculous for Communists to talk about their ''dictatorship of the proletariat.'' since Russia's dictatorship is quite as much a one-man affair as Italy's. Josef Stalin and Benito Mussolini are the infinities at which the extremes of dictatorship meet. Next to Russia. Italy has the nearest thing to a nation-wide planned economic system, the Mussolini "Corporative State" (TIME, Nov. 20 et ante). In the Rome of the Caesars Communist Litvinoff will be welcomed and understood, but Italians were ready to bet their black shirts that Atheist Litvinoff will not be received in the Rome of the Church.

* Composed by a Frenchman to words originally French it is the anthem not of Soviet Russia but, properly speaking, the World Communist Party. First verse (as sung in Russia today) :

Arise, ye toilers of all nations

Condemned to misery and woe;

To Hell with humbleness and patience,

Give deadly battle, to your joe!

Wipe out the ruling wealthy classes,

Arise and slash your thralldom chains,

Let power be, wielded by the masses,

Let those who labor hold the reins!

/-The Russian fashion is to heap caviar high on a tall-stemmed glass dish from which the Soviet eater (usually a tourist) scoops great spoonfuls.

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