ABSTRACT
As the first swallow announcing a timid Spring in the relations between Germany and Russia, Stalin selected the diplomatist Youreniev. In reality, Stalin was very adroitly returning the ball to his enemies, who were frustrating his foreign policy and restricting the liberty of movement which he had found so indispensable. The machinery of repression functioned without a break. The sometime Vice-Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Karakhan, Zukermann, Youreniev, and many other diplomatists were all tried at the same time. Now, in 1917 Youreniev and Karakhan had been members of Trotzky's 'inter-departmental' organization in Petrograd, which in August of that year was merged into the Bolshevik Party. Stalin, for tactical reasons, began to pay longer and longer visits to Sotchi on the Black Sea. There he spent the time with his children in his new Villa Nadejda, built by a Russian architect of French origin, Auphane.
