Second Emigration
When the Russian government began arresting Bolsheviks in 1906, Litvinov left the country and spent the next ten years as émigré and arms dealer for the party. Based in Paris he travelled throughout Europe, sometimes posing as a procurement officer from Ecuador, buying rifles in Belgium, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Despite some notable disasters, such as the wrecking of a gun running yacht on the Romanian coast, he had some success in smuggling these arms into Russia via Finland and the Black Sea.
In 1907 he attended the 5th Party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London. Initially he had to rely on the charity of the Rowton Houses for accommodation in London. However, eventually the party arranged a rented house for him that he shared with Joseph Stalin, who had also been anxious to find more comfortable housing than the Rowton poor hostels.
In 1908 he was arrested under the name Meer Wallach by French police, while carrying twelve 500-ruble banknotes that were taken from a bank in Tiflis during the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery that took place on 26 June 1907. Litvinov was deported from France to England and lived in London, where he was active in the International Socialist Bureau. In early 1918, he was frequently reported in the British and American press as the foreign representative of the Bolsheviks in the UK, a claim given some substance by R. H. Bruce Lockhart, a British agent in Moscow at the time. In England he met and married Ivy Lowe, daughter of one of the most distinguished Jewish families in Britain. Miss Lowe’s ancestors emigrated from Hungary to England following the unsuccessful 1848 revolution. Her father, Walter Lowe, was a prominent writer and a close friend of H.G. Wells. They enjoyed frequent exchanges, Lowe espousing the Jewish point of view, and Wells a secular philosophy.
For a while Litvinov also lived in North Belfast in Northern Ireland.
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