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100 years ago: British socialists clamour for peace

ON January 3 1918, Maxim Litvinov, a Russian communist living with his wife in a modest home in Hillfield Road, a turning off West End Lane, West Hampstead, read in a newspaper of a radio message from the Petrograd capital of the Bolshevik government, that he had been appointed ambassador to Britain.

“Citizen Litvinoff is appointed plenipotentiary in London,” he learned.

Less than two months earlier, Lenin’s Bolshevik government had withdrawn from its predecessor’s alliance with Britain and France in the war against Germany and Austria.

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