If such conferences are ever held in America, Litvinov might prove the most popular of the group. Any country which is satisfied with the familiar type of our middle western Congressmen will not reject an intelligent proletarian like Litvinov. Some of our rough-and-ready Senators will surely feel much more at home with his bluntness than with Krassin’s smooth, impenetrable Old Worldliness. Litvinov reminds one of a successful mining man from Alaska or a lumber king from the West. Krassin is more like those quiet, powerful, coldly intelligent men who manage railroads, Wall Street and the world’s finance. Krassin, who once managed the great Putilov factory and was considered one of the most able engineers in Russia, is now pretty generally conceded the strongest man next to Lenin. As a force for stability and reconstruction he is immensely valuable to the Soviets. He has maintained a mental equilibrium which many of the other Commissars have lost. Contact with men of different political opinions is a great dissolver of mental cobwebs. Krassin’s continual coming and going has probably helped him to maintain his perspective. When one remains too long in Russia, the outside world often appears incomprehensible just as Russia appears incomprehensible to the outside world. I remember a conversation I had with him during the blockade. “Whenever Russia,” he said, “ceases to be a country visited only by ‘brave’ and ‘adventuresome’ and ‘occasional’ travelers, the Russian people and the Russian government will be no more interesting and no more evil than the governments and the people of the rest of the world; it will no longer be necessary for writers to exaggerate about us.” David Rothstein is a deep and thorough student of Socialism. Theoretically, he believes that he knows the only true way to cure the wounds of humanity; he reverences Marx as some men do Mohammed. But in real life he is fussy, narrow, selfish and without personal loyalty. He cannot imagine applying his doctrines to his immediate surroundings, and so he fundamentally fails. Fresh from London, he spent his time ordering suits from the Soviet tailor and fuming because they did not fit perfectly; this in a country literally of rags. He was more worried about his son’s dismissal from Oxford than about the thousands of young men being slaughtered on the various Russian fronts. He exclaimed generously, “We must have victory no matter how many men it takes!” But he kept his own sons in England. He could never see anything in Wells’ articles for American papers except the flippant remarks about Marx which made him writhe in mental agony. At present Rothstein is Ambassador to Persia, and Litvinov and Krassin are working in harmony. There are many other men in the Foreign Office of interesting and varied character; very few are workmen or peasants. I will take for example, four typical men: Weinstein, Karakhan, Florinsky and Axionov.