Grigorie J. Sokolnikov, newly appointed Soviet Ambassador to Britain, arrived in London fortnight ago, bought a new dress suit in which to present his credentials to King George, and waited. Eight days passed. Conservatives, chuckling at a chance to embarrass the Labor Government, stood up in Parliament and loudly asked why the new Soviet Ambassador had not been received. Foreign Secretary “Uncle Arthur” Henderson scowled.
“The delay is entirely our fault,” said he enigmatically, “not his.” What “Uncle Arthur” meant, what every M. P. and most well-informed Londoners knew, was that the delay was really the fault of His Majesty the King-Emperor. Stubbornly, and to the huge embarrassment of his Labor Government, George V refused to shake the hand of any representative of Soviet Russia, for it was the Soviet Government which decreed the assassination in 1918 of a brown-bearded, nervous little man known to the world as His Imperial Majesty Nicholas II, Tsar of All the Russias, known still to George V of Britain as “Dear Cousin Nicky.”
Though Britain began full diplomatic relations with the Soviet in 1924, the necessity of shaking hands with the Tsar’s murderers did not arise. At that time Russia had only a chargé d’affaires in London, and mere chargés need not meet the Crown. Ambassadors are different, but all last week Cousin George V remained adamant. “I have not forgotten,” said he.
Finally it was Edward of Wales who saved an embarrassing situation. He was still officially a member of the Regency Council appointed to deputize for King George (TIME, Dec. 10, 1928), and for duty’s sake he would shake hands with anyone. Relieved palace officials announced that His Majesty was “too ill” to receive the new Ambassador, that the Prince of Wales would act in his father’s place.
Dutifully Edward of Wales dressed himself in the scarlet and blue of the Welsh Guards, strewed medals on his chest, clapped a monumental fur busby on his head and walked round the corner from his home in York House to the entrance of St. James’s Palace proper.
Britain’s welcome to the Soviet Ambassador, though delayed, was sumptuous. Two coaches from the royal stable carried the Communist party from their hotel to St. James’s. Scarlet-coated footmen were on the box, Ambassador Sokolnikov, trying to look proletarian under his silk hat, sat inside with Major-General Sir John Hanbury-Williams, diplomatic corps marshal. In the Ambassadors’ Court at St. James’s Palace, the Reds were met by four of the King’s marshalmen in peaked caps and Elizabethan costumes (resembling a cross between the Jack of Hearts and a master of hounds), and Mr. J. B. Monk of the Foreign Office. Sir John Hanbury-Williams led the party to the throne room where Edward of Wales shook hands with a representative of the murderers of his father’s cousin.
H. R. H. may have taken comfort in the fact it would be hard to find a less murderous Communist than Ambassador Sokolnikov. Born in 1888, son of a moderately well-to-do bourgeois family, he was exiled for socialist tendencies, went to Paris, where he graduated from the Sorbonne. After the Revolution he returned to Russia, in 1918 was an editorial writer on Pravda, now the Soviet’s official mouthpiece. Despite his bourgeois background, he led a Soviet army in Turkestan against counter revolutionists, then became Minister of the Treasury and in 1928 head of the Soviet oil syndicate. In choosing him first Ambassador to Britain, Dictator Josef Stalin picked the Communist most acceptable to Britons, probably the mildest Communist still in the Soviet’s good graces.
Indeed Soviet leaders are none too sure of Ambassador Sokolnikov’s loyalty. So accompanying him to St. James’s Palace was Dmitri Bogomoloff, Councilor of the Embassy, recently Minister to Poland, reorganizer of Moscow’s entire Foreign Intelligence Service. It was no secret to most foreign observers that Councilor Bogomooff’s real job in London would be to follow every move of Ambassador Sokolnikov, to report directly to Stalin himself.
That Councilor Bogomoloff might not occupy his spare time by Russian secret service in Britain, Ambassador Sokolnikov paid a formal visit to Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson, gave formal pledges that the Soviet Government would not engage in propaganda either in Britain or in any of the Dominions.
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