Litvinoff the land – Frank McNally with more on a Russian revolutionary’s Irish past

My scepticism about whether Maxim Litvinov, revolutionary friend of Lenin and later Stalin’s foreign minister, could have had an earlier career as a travelling haberdashery salesman in Patrick Kavanagh’s Inniskeen (Diary, September 28th), has been somewhat allayed by readers.
Niall Lombard writes with a memory inherited from his grandfather, born in Ballyhooley, Co Cork, who recalled that circa 1907/08 he was friendly with a Russian commercial traveller, “Barney” Litvinov, an occasional visitor to the area.
Many years later – by then married and living in Dublin – he went to the cinema and saw a newsreel about May Day in Moscow:
“The commentator referred to the parade being reviewed by Soviet leader Stalin accompanied by foreign minister Maxim Litvinov. My grandfather immediately recognised his old acquaintance . . . ”
This is an impressive detail, although I suspect some confusion of names. As we noted Saturday, Litvinov’s link with Ireland was his sister Rifka and her husband, David Levinson, fellow emigrés who lived for a time in Clones before moving to Belfast.
But there seems to have been another brother-in-law named Barney Levinson, a “furniture and horse” merchant based in Cavan, who also had a “a wonderful corn cure called Zeevik”.
He too travelled Ireland and, according to press archives, variously sold “packets of pins” or bought “old copper and brass”.
At the time Litvinov resigned as Soviet foreign minister in 1939, the Irish Press reported that he and David Levinson “came to Ireland about half-a-century ago with five pounds in their pockets” and that “both became pedlars, selling cheap jewellery and fancy goods”.
But in 1952, Cavan’s Anglo-Celt newspaper also recorded how a former editor “often recounted having met Litvinov, then a travelling scrap merchant, when taking his daily walk in the country.” So perhaps he and Barney Levinson worked together too.
Those memories may relate to Litvinov’s first period of exile, before the 1905 Revolution, and before Patrick Kavanagh (born 1904) could have remembered him visiting.
The paradox of his second period in Ireland, if that’s what it was, is that Litvinov was by then carrying 100,000 roubles, proceeds of the 1907 Tbilisi bank robbery, which he, Lenin, and Stalin had all helped organise.
Then again, that was considered Bolshevik party funds. And besides, it was in large-denomination notes, of which the serial numbers had been well circulated. He probably did still need to work.
My thanks too to Dr Maurice J Casey of Queen’s University who also wrote to me on this subject.
Maurice has just published a book on the tangentially-related Hotel Lux, a communist nerve centre in 1920s Moscow, which has a fascinating Irish angle. By the time you read this, I hope to have attended his Tuesday night talk on it as part of the Dublin History Festival.
In the meantime, he warned me that the variant spelling “Litvinoff” was once common here. This useful tip yielded several new archive hits. Indeed, I was briefly startled to read of how the portly Litvinoff had once, circa 1940, won a 550-yard race in Kilkee. But on closer inspection, that was a greyhound.
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Speaking of being startled, in the first draft of my column on Saturday, I suggested Patrick Kavanagh had been born the same year as the 1905 Revolution. Then, soon after hitting “send”, I headed north for the annual Kavanagh Weekend, to conduct a Q & A with keynote speaker Emily Cullen.
Imagine my embarrassment when her fine talk, which was partly about how she curated the centenary commemorations 20 years ago, was accompanied in large print on the screen behind by the poet’s actual date of birth. I just had time to dash off stage afterwards and ring the night editor with a correction.
There was another moment of alarm on Saturday when I chaired a panel on “War and Peace in Northern Ireland”.
The speakers were Irish Times literary editor Martin Doyle, talking about his superb Troubles memoir, Dirty Linen, and Eamonn Mallie, now 74, who looks back on his epic journalism career in the autobiography Eyewitness to War and Peace.
While reading up on both beforehand, I was reminded (by Matthew O’Toole’s review in this paper) that as star reporter in Downtown Radio, Mallie was always known simply by his surname, “uttered in amusement or exasperation”.
The habit extended to the man himself. O’Toole, now an SDLP MLA, did work experience in Downtown back around 2000 and never met the star, who was always out on the front line somewhere. But answering the phone once, he “shrank in awe” as the famous voice introduced itself as “Mallie!”
Anyway, at 6pm last Saturday, when our panel due to start, there was no sign of Eamonn. Ditto at 6.05 and 6.10. Was it possible he’d got lost? No. When I rang his mobile, sure enough and to our great relief, a voice said: “Mallie!”
He was still on the font line: in this case McNello’s bar across the road, hearing Kavanagh stories from locals.
Our venue was Inniskeen’s old Protestant church. Unusually for a church these days, it was full.
Also unusually, at the end – and even before I told the attendance to go in peace – they gave the lads a standing ovation.