Further to John Ryan’s memoir of Bohemian Dublin in the post-Emergency years, discussed here yesterday, another of its fascinating but questionable stories about Patrick Kavanagh concerned a Russian emigré named Maxim Litvinov.
By the 1940s, when Kavanagh was supposedly reminiscing about him in Dublin pubs, Litvinov was a very famous man. He had been foreign minister for the Soviet Union throughout the 1930s, until falling out with Stalin in 1939 over the impending pact with Hitler.
Unlike many who fell out with Stalin, he somehow survived the experience and went on to be appointed Soviet ambassador to the US, returning to Moscow after the war to become deputy foreign minister.
Mind you, the man who had replaced him in the main job, Vyacheslav Molotov (of petrol bomb/cocktail fame), is on record as having said that during Stalin’s purges, Litvinov had “remained among the living only by chance”.
Prince of the church – Brian Maye on Cardinal Michael Logue
Conflict of many colours – Frank McNally on a finely illustrated atlas of the Civil War
Lunar quest – Frank McNally on moon missions, misinformed quiz questions, and mountweazels
The Dromcollogher cinema fire disaster – Frank McNally on a fateful day in 1926
Anyway, back to Ryan’s memoir which, quoting Kavanagh, claims that about 40 years earlier, in exile from Tsarist Russia, Litvinov had for a time been a travelling salesman in Ireland, based in the Cavan-Monaghan region, and specialising in “haberdashery”.
“Paddy was no name-dropper,” joked Ryan as a prelude to the tale: “If a name meant anything to him he liked to hold on to it, and possibly caress it.”
He had delighted in entertaining pub companions with stories about his early publisher, Harold Macmillan (later British prime minister), and the Earl of Iveagh, head of the Guinness family, who became a patron and friend.
“But the name which could stop the chatter was that of Maxim Litvinov,” continued Ryan.
“During the years in the wilderness, when the other Bolshevik founding fathers were hatching plots or, like Lenin, scheming in the same Zurich café as James Joyce chose to relax from the labours of Ulysses, Litvinov was a door-to-door pedlar in Ireland
“Paddy remembered well his occasional visits to the humble Kavanagh dwelling in Mucker and how Mr Litvinov would come to the door, open his carpet bag and lay out on his kitchen table his spread of alarm clocks, holy pictures, combs, costume jewellery, toys and other exotic trinkets.”
We’ll leave aside the lack of anything recognisable as haberdashery on that list. But is it possible that the story in general was true?
Well, we do know that Litvinov spent much of his pre-Revolutionary adulthood outside imperial Russia. Born into a wealthy Lithuanian Jewish family as Meir Henoch Wallach-Finkelstein in 1876, he adopted his now better-known name as a cover when joining the banned Russian Social Democrat Party.
He later spent time in jail before joining a mass escape and moving to Geneva, then London, where he first met Lenin in the British Museum Reading Room.
Litvinov returned to Russia for the 1905 Revolution – the year Patrick Kavanagh was born. But he was soon forced out again by the threat of arrest. And for the next 10 years he was definitely a travelling dealer of sorts, but trading primarily in guns rather than haberdashery or holy pictures, for smuggling back to Russia.
In 1908, he was arrested in France while in possession of 500-ruble notes stolen the year earlier in a major bank robbery, led by Stalin himself, in Georgia. He was ordered to be extradited, but before this could happen moved to London and then, sometime before the first World War, Belfast.
According to a 2011 essay by Jonathan Hamill for the history magazine, Old Belfast, the link was his sister and her husband, fellow exiles who had lived for a time in Enniskillen and later Clones, before settling in Belfast.
When he joined them there, Hamill says, he was “carrying a suitcase containing 100,000 Rubles” which he called “the sacred property of the [Bolshevik] Party”. He also carried a loaded revolver and a Gurkha-style knife wherever he went.
During his Belfast years, he read avidly in the city’s Central Library, wrote regular letters to Lenin, Gorky, and Prince Kropotkin, but also worked as a teacher, passing on knowledge of some of the 14 languages he was reputed to master.
In the meantime, his sister’s house was watched constantly by two officers of the Okranha, the tsar’s secret police. But at some point, Litvinof eluded them to slip quietly out of Belfast and into history, as the Soviet Union’s first (if not officially recognised) envoy to the UK.
It seems unlikely that this high-powered gun-runner would have taken time out to serve as a door-to-door salesmen in early 20th century Inniskeen and its environs, unless it was an undercover mission or he was attending masterclasses in smuggling.
And he doesn’t seem to merit mention in Kavanagh’s early autobiography, The Green Fool, or in Antoinette Quinn’s biography of the poet. But you never know.
Some of Litvinov’s life remains a mystery, including the circumstances of his death on the last day of 1951. According to his family, he succumbed to a known heart problem.
Others suggest he was effectively assassinated on Stalin’s orders, dying from his injuries sometime after a lorry had deliberately crashed into his car.