RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ivan Maiskii or Maisky (properly Ivan Mikhailovich Lyakhovetsky), like his mentor, Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov (also a Jew), belonged to the old school of Soviet diplomacy, which is to say he was expected to establish close working and social relationships with the most senior British political figures, informing Moscow of developments and endeavouring to influence British policy in his own country’s interests—the normal function of any senior diplomat, and one in which Maisky revelled and excelled. This traditional role, where personal initiative was vital, all but vanished in the late 1930s and 1940s under Molotov as Foreign Minister: Soviet ambassadors were now to do little more than execute orders from Moscow.

Maisky’s performance of the traditional role, one Stalin certainly understood and initially supported, is what makes these diaries so revelatory. Writing them, Maisky was aware of Stalin as a potential reader (he later willed them to the dictator), and assumed Stalin would understand what was required to get the diplomatic work done. Maisky was indispensable to Stalin in London because he alone had all the requisite contacts, their trust, confidence and (in many cases) liking. His best trick, as Gorodetsky repeatedly shows, was “to convey to Moscow his own ideas, while attributing them to his interlocutors. It was the only effective way of operating, with the Terror raging in the 1930s.”

Maisky well knew that he was ideologically suspect. In July 1918, during the civil war, he had deserted the revolution to become minister for labour in the Samara-based Komuch government, the sole armed socialist insurgency against Bolshevism—something never forgotten nor entirely forgiven. He had come to know and love England during his years as a Menshevik exile from Tsarism, and then and later the sensitive, artistic, cosmopolitan, charming and rather conceited little man had won to himself many long-term friends, including Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Lloyd George and Victor Gollancz (founder of the Left Book Club). So what do his diaries have to tell us by way of the historically revealing, interesting, curious and amusing?

The diaries only begin in late 1934, so we start there. It was December 17 and Maisky had invited the Coles over, probably for lunch. Oxford professor G.D.H. Cole, well-intentioned Fabian socialist best known for his book The Common People (if you studied modern British history you probably read it), was frightfully distressed by news of the secret trials organised under Stalin’s aegis following Sergei Kirov’s murder in Leningrad. Cole’s friends in the Labour and Trade Union Congress had organised the “Declaration of the 43” in protest at these summary trials and the executions that followed. Could Ivan please explain what was going on in Moscow?

Maisky was not prepared to put up with whining nonsense from a conscience-stricken marshmallow socialist. He knew how to handle the eminent professor and his wife. “I gave my guests a stern ticking-off”, as he recorded that night, informing them:

over the last three or four months the Soviet authorities had established the existence of a large terrorist conspiracy against our Party leaders, beginning with Comrade Stalin. Its agents are Russian White Guards and all those dissatisfied little groups which exist inside the USSR.

Many attempted assassinations of leading Party figures had been foiled, but “the plotters got lucky with Kirov”. That was why the Soviet government was coming down hard not only on those involved in Kirov’s murder:

but all those arrested at various times and in various places in recent months in connection with terrorism. We couldn’t try the terrorists publicly without risking serious complications with Germany and other states that would undoubtedly have been implicated in this case. It is a hard and unpleasant thing to shoot 80–100 people, but it is still better than to risk the lives of millions of workers and peasants on the battlefield. Moreover one should never forget the words of Mirabeau, who said, some 140 years ago, that revolution cannot be made with lavender oil.

In his diary Maisky noted that “The Coles did not object”. Why would they object?—they’d come to learn.

Three days later he was writing that “The kafuffle over the shootings does not abate. Barely have I liquidated the protests of the ‘Left’ Labourites than the Right appears on the horizon … Today, the Daily Herald published an indignant editorial.” That editorial had called the executions “barbarous and unworthy of a regime which professes to be the most advanced in the world”. A ridiculous kafuffle indeed, but Maisky felt confident he was successfully “liquidating” the problem.

On March 29, 1935, Anthony Eden had a meeting with Stalin in Moscow on the initiative of Maisky, who together with his boss Litvinov was endeavouring to bring about a mutual-assistance pact between Britain, France and the USSR, to deter an attack on any one of them. That was something Britain, wishing to keep its options open with Germany, and always suspicious of Moscow’s motives, was reluctant to go along with. Maisky was present, as were Litvinov, Molotov and British ambassador Viscount Chilston. Stalin’s wit was on display: “Take the six of us present in this room,” he offered. “Suppose we concluded a mutual assistance pact and suppose Comrade Maisky wanted to attack one of us—what would happen? With our combined strength, we would give Comrade Maisky a hiding.” The joke, a good one, was that little Maisky couldn’t present a physical threat to anyone. Molotov, laughing, said, “That’s why Comrade Maisky is behaving so humbly.” His point was that Maisky was normally conceited. Eden, looking across at Maisky, quipped, “Yes, I quite understand your metaphor.” The exchange is recorded by Gorodetsky from another source. It reveals Maisky’s vulnerability to slights from his superiors, which is why he himself would never have recorded it.

He did record Lady Vansittart’s crushing response when he was endeavouring to equate the murder of the Tsar with the execution of Charles I: “Yes, but that was two centuries ago and more, and you killed the entire imperial family. Why! You even killed their dog!”

On July 29, 1937, Maisky had a long talk with Chamberlain in his office at the House of Commons. Maisky wanted to know “which in his view are the best methods to achieve the ‘appeasement of Europe’”. Chamberlain, taken aback, thought for a while, then came out with this extraordinary response, a classic in the annals of appeasement:

I cannot suggest a shortcut to achieving this result. The appeasement of Europe is a complicated and lengthy business. It demands great patience. Any means and any methods that might prove effective are good. Any available opportunity should be exploited … If we could bring the Germans to the negotiating table and, with pencil in hand, run through all their complaints, claims and wishes, this would greatly help clear the air or at least clarify the current situation.

A few months later, at a state banquet given on November 16 by George VI for King Leopold of Belgium, Churchill took Maisky aside to inquire about reports of massive purges within the officer ranks of the Red Army. What on earth was happening inside the USSR? Hadn’t these events greatly weakened the army’s ability to withstand pressure from Japan and Germany? “We need a strong, a very strong Russia,” Churchill insisted.

Stalin would have been pleased with Maisky’s response:

“May I reply with a question?” I began, and continued: “If a disloyal general commanding a corps or an army is replaced by an honest and reliable general, is this weakening or strengthening an army? If a director of a big gun factory, engaged in sabotage, is replaced by an honest and reliable director, is this the weakening or the strengthening of our military industry?” I continued in this vein, dismantling the old wives’ tales which are currently so popular here about the effect of the “purge” on the general condition of the USSR. Churchill listened to me with the greatest attention, although he shook his head distrustfully every now and again. When I had finished, he said: “It is very comforting to hear all this. If Russia is growing stronger, not weaker, then all is well. I repeat: we all need a strong Russia, we need it very much!” Then, after a moment’s pause, Churchill added: “That Trotsky, he is a perfect devil. He is a destructive, and not a creative force. I’m wholly for Stalin!”

How much of this did Maisky believe? Did Churchill really say, “I’m wholly for Stalin!”? À propos Trotsky, perhaps he did say it. Maisky was writing these diaries as if Stalin were looking over his shoulder, and yet he probably did believe the purges of the Red Army were necessary, though he seems to have been shocked to learn from Churchill on September 30, 1938, “that the British Government has received a document confirming that between 60 and 70% of the officers in our air forces have been ‘liquidated’ in some form or another”. In Washington during the war Soviet Ambassador Litvinov told his friend Sir Owen Dixon (who recorded the conversation in his diary) that the purges of the Red Army elite were nothing more nor less than the elimination of the fifth column before the threatening war. It’s probable that both Maisky and Litvinov really believed this. Stalin certainly did. How much influence Trotsky still had within the ranks of the CPSU and professional elites by 1937 was foggy, uncertain to Stalin himself.

In any case, as war loomed, cosmopolitanism and internationalism were out and patriotism was mandatory. In 1943 Stalin would dissolve the Comintern: in the hour of peril, only nationalist-communists were wanted. On New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1943 ticking into January 1, 1944, with Soviet armies rolling west, Radio Moscow would broadcast for the first time a musically-beautiful new anthem, “Hymn of the Soviet Union”, and the Internationale would be heard no more at the conclusion of transmissions. Litvinov and Maisky, whose time by then had effectively passed, were hardly in the Trotskyist line of regime-change evangelism (more recent US ex-Trotskyists come to mind), but they were internationalists, and cosmopolitan in feeling.

So naturally, as the Moscow trials proceeded through 1937 and 1938, Maisky and Litvinov felt increasingly insecure. Yet even as other ambassadors were being recalled one after another and disappearing, both continued bravely to strive for a tripartite Anglo-Franco-Soviet mutual-assistance pact, knowing that anti-communist and pro-German feeling within British government circles made such a pact a long shot and that Stalin was tiring of their fruitless efforts. Eden’s replacement by Halifax in 1938 was another blow to Litvinov’s concept of collective security. By early 1939 Stalin, reading the signs of repeated appeasement by Britain, was sending feelers to Hitler, replacing Litvinov with Molotov as Foreign Minister, and probably considering replacing Maisky too, if only someone equally familiar with affairs in Britain could be found—which they couldn’t. Soon the NKVD would be inserted into the London embassy in the shape of Kiril Novikov, and from then on, in all Maisky did, he found himself “accompanied”. Joseph P. Kennedy, the American ambassador to London, told Roosevelt that when he was discussing the Moscow trials with Maisky the latter “looked scared to death himself … Poor old Russian Ambassador! I hope he will not die of fright if he is sent for.”

But sent for he was, in late May 1938, not for the last time either, taken to the Lubyanka and forced to compose a self-incriminating account of how he had failed to recognise “enemies of the people” in his embassy: the military attaché and the head of the Soviet trade delegation had both given evidence against him before being shot. Then on June 1 he was driven, along with Litvinov, to the Kremlin where, in the presence of Voroshilov and Molotov, they were told by Stalin to keep a low profile and act more prudently. What a relief! One wonders how many pairs of underwear Maisky carried in his overnight bags that visit.

Knowing now through personal experience how murderous the regime had become, Maisky must surely have despised some of the fellow travellers he came across in England—the despicable Dean of Canterbury, for instance, Dr Hewlett Johnson (“the Red Dean”), who hosted the Maiskys on June 30, 1939. One would like to think that contempt hides within the lines Maisky devotes to this man:

His 65 years notwithstanding, the dean recently married a young artist aged 35, his student. True, the dean is still full of life, energy and panache, even though he is nearly bald and the hair that remains (down the sides) is the bright colour of senile silver. But the English take a different view of such things from us Russians. Just the other day I read in a newspaper that an 89-year-old lord has married a widow of 45. And such an occurrence is no exception.

Maisky then describes the dean’s affluent lifestyle and his ancient house and surrounds:

In spite of all this antiquity, the dean is a perfectly contemporary man. Strolling about the garden we chatted on various philosophical subjects, and the dean confessed to me that the question of the afterlife was unclear to him: maybe it exists, or maybe it doesn’t. An equal number of arguments can be adduced for and against, so the dean considers the issue a moot point.

What mattered, the dean insisted, was that Christianity on this earth was:

possible only under socialism or, still better, under communism. That is why Dr Johnson considers the USSR to be the only truly Christian country in our day … and, incidentally, devotes so many of his sermons in the cathedral to the USSR … He has just finished writing a book about the USSR which is to be published by Gollancz.

Confused, perplexed and distraught describes Maisky on the morning of August 22, 1939, when he learned of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, though he had immediately to accommodate his diary entries to the new reality. All the fellow travellers he knew were in profound shock, and we’ll come to them. There was one brutal realist, however. “Since early morning,” Maisky wrote that evening:

there has been a great commotion, almost panic, in town today. Telephone calls. Visits. Requests to see me. Lloyd George came specially from Churt, and invited me for lunch in his office. The old man is anxious, but he fully understands us. He told me plainly: “I’ve been expecting this for a long time. I’m still amazed at your patience. How could you negotiate with this Government for so long? … While Chamberlain remains in charge, there will be no ‘peace front’. This man will destroy the Empire.”

Most of Maisky’s friends, unlike the realist Lloyd George, were in mental trauma, which turned to deepest anger on September 17 when the USSR joined Germany in dividing up Poland. “All this struck London like a bolt from the blue,” Maisky noted:

True, there has long been talk and suspicion here of a German-Soviet agreement to “partition Poland”, but the crossing of the Polish border by the Red Army has come as a real shock … What will be the response to our actions in England? … I expect a note of protest, an angry speech in Parliament by the prime minister, and campaigns in the press, but nothing more.

Two nations invaded Poland in September 1939 but Britain declared war on just one—that’s realpolitik. You can’t declare war on everyone. Within twenty-four hours Maisky’s prediction was proving correct: “My expectations are beginning to be fulfilled. Yesterday, late in the evening, the British Government made a toothless statement, not even a protest, concerning our actions in Poland.” As he wrote a few days later, “The PM did not declare war on us. He did not even risk expressing disapproval of the Moscow treaty.” This proves that Maisky saw a British declaration of war on the USSR as logical in terms of the British guarantees to Poland, and despised Britain for its inaction. What a turn-about!

The events of recent weeks have wreaked havoc with people’s minds. Gollancz is in despair: in his view the Soviet-German pact killed off communism … Cummings, writing in the News Chronicle (September 19), simply cannot make sense of things. Duff Cooper published an article in today’s Evening Standard about “Two Breeds of Bolshevism”—communism and fascism. Every day I receive many letters—anonymous and otherwise—which show their authors to be in a quite incredible state of shock. Yes, the general muddle is on a colossal scale. And it is not easy to combat: there’s a lack of information and materials for that purpose.

Halifax had a meeting with Maisky on September 27 where, Maisky writes, “I gave a brief description of Polish landownership and the poverty and exploitation of the Polish, Ukrainian and Belorussian peasantry.” Halifax asked him, “And what do you do with the landlords’ land?” “It is confiscated without exception,” Maisky replied, “and distributed among the peasants.” With that Halifax shook his hand, “and uttered gloomily: ‘A grim tale.’ His landlord’s heart couldn’t bear it.”

There are many other amusing bits. On October 15 Maisky went to see Sidney and Beatrice Webb. “How much snobbery there is even in the best English people,” he wrote afterwards:

In conversation with the Webbs I mentioned what Churchill said to me the other day: “Better communism than Nazism!” Beatrice shrugged her shoulders and noted that such a statement was not typical of the British ruling elite, and I would tend to agree. But then, for some reason, she found it necessary to add: “Churchill is not a true Englishman, you know. He has negro blood. You can tell even from his appearance.” Then Beatrice told me a long story about Churchill’s mother coming from the South of the USA and there being some negro blood in her family. Her sister looked just like a “Negroid”.

Things got worse. Maisky mentioned the African explorer Henry Stanley. Beatrice said she had known him in her youth—an unpleasant man, but what really upset her was that Stanley had married one of her friends. Everyone had been astonished at the match because “She came from a very good family, an educated, considerate and beautiful girl, while he was a real upstart, a coarse, uncouth fellow.” Beatrice appealed to Sidney for support and he backed her up. Maisky couldn’t understand it. How could such progressive folk as the Webbs have such attitudes?

That exemplifies the limits of Maisky’s understanding of the British upper-middle class. “One always carries one’s class with one”—hadn’t he heard that in England? A straight-down-the-line, up-from-nowhere communist, he wasn’t sufficiently alert to the play of class-based self-esteem, though he picked up some of it. Another funny example is his encounter with Lord Wakefield, businessman and former lord mayor of London. Wakefield told him that many years ago he had booked tickets for St Petersburg but had had to cancel them on receiving a telegram claiming “plague in Russia”. From that alone Maisky should have deduced that something was coming his way. What then followed, in Maisky’s words, was this:

“Tell me,” [Wakefield] continued, wiping his brow and appearing to remember something. “You seem to have a man … Lenin … Is he really terribly clever?” “I can assure you he was,” I answered, smiling, “but unfortunately he died back in 1924.” “Died?” Wakefield sounded disappointed. “Really? … I wasn’t aware of that.” See how the cream of the English bourgeoisie is informed about Soviet affairs! Truly it smacks of the Middle Ages.

No, Maisky, it smacks of a dégagé pose, translatable as, “Of course I wouldn’t know much about your country.” Maisky loved England but never got that bit.

On October 17, 1939, he lunched with Rab Butler, who blithely told him:

We need the assurance that if we conclude peace today, it will not be broken in six months’ time. We are ready to pay a high price for a solid and lasting peace of 20 to 25 years. We would not even refuse Germany substantial colonial concessions. We have a large Empire and we do not need every part of it. Something could be found for the Germans. Not Tanganyika, of course, which could easily be turned into a naval and air base on the Indian Ocean, but perhaps Togo, Cameroon, etc.

One thinks of all those official British wartime papers classified: “Not to be released until 2045.”

In the wake of the German-Soviet pact, and then the Soviet attack on Finland, Maisky’s acquaintanceship in England was drying up, many of the invitations he regularly sent out going unanswered, but he still had some powerful acquaintances in and outside government. Following the rapid collapse of France in May-June 1940, for instance, he lunched with American Ambassador Kennedy, who:

takes a gloomy view of British prospects. He doubts that England will be able to wage a long war single-handedly. He accepts the possibility of a German invasion of the Isles. He thinks it utterly inevitable that England will be almost completely destroyed by air raids.

America, Kennedy believed, would stay out unless something extraordinary occurred, such as the Germans using poison gas. Implying that it was all largely England’s fault, Kennedy “scolded the British Government for failing to come to an agreement with the Soviet Union last year and said that the upper classes of British society are ‘completely rotten’. A rather unexpected judgment from a man of his status!”

Here was another black hole in Maisky’s understanding. As he knew, Kennedy’s perceived status was rich Catholic Irish-American Ambassador and businessman from Boston, so the judgment was to be expected (and half-true). On the other hand Maisky was very shrewd about Kennedy’s diplomatic motives:

At the bottom of it all lies the fact that Kennedy is a wealthy, orthodox Irish Catholic who has a mortal terror of revolution and would like to live in harmony with “fascist dictators”. That explains his dislike of the Soviet Union, his liking of Chamberlain, whom he has always supported, and his fear of a war which may, under certain circumstances, unleash revolutionary potentialities.

Also, of course, Joe Kennedy in numerous ways admired the Nazis.

Gorodetsky elucidates many of Maisky’s diary entries by inserting editorial commentary, such as the following, which I found interesting because I had not previously associated the incorporation into the USSR of the Baltic states with the collapse of France, never asking myself why it happened when it did. Under the secret protocols of the German-Soviet pact the Baltic states had of course been defined as lying within the Soviet sphere of influence, but with the fall of France, “Complacency gave way to profound concern, leading to the hasty occupation of Bessarabia and the annexation of the Baltic states.” Moreover, “Stalin feared that Britain, under siege and with no apparent prospect of victory, might try to embroil Russia in a war with Germany. He was as suspicious that Britain might sign a peace treaty with Germany.” Britain, in turn, was worried that the German-Soviet non-aggression pact might become a full-scale alliance. The USSR was avowedly neutral in respect to this “imperialist war”, but Maisky’s sympathies were transparently with Britain, while Moscow was hedging its bets while preparing for the worst.

In early August 1940 his interest was caught by the transfer of Australian troops from Britain to the Middle East:

Why Australians in particular? There are two reasons. First, they are good fighters. Second, no one knows how to deal with them in England: they are just too “free-spirited”. They disregard discipline, disobey their officers, fail to salute and constantly quarrel with the British soldiers. The War Department is only too glad to get them off its hands and is sending them to Egypt and Palestine.

Already by the beginning of April 1941 Maisky had reason to believe that Germany was preparing an invasion of the USSR. Through his intelligence channels he knew that:

A great quantity of troops is passing through Prague in the direction of the Soviet border. There is a Geographical Institute in Prague which passed into German hands long ago. This Institute is now urgently engaged in producing detailed maps of the Ukraine.

His friends in Whitehall knew it too. “You’d better remove road signs in the Ukraine double-quick,” Brendan Bracken told him on April 9, and Vansittart was saying something similar. Lloyd George told Maisky of a meeting with Churchill at which the prime minister had said “a German attack on the Soviet Union in the very near future is inevitable”, and then, Lloyd George added, “the USSR will fall like a ‘ripe fruit’ into Churchill’s basket”. That was just what Maisky, who had never given up on his goal of winning Britain over to closer ties with Moscow, was hoping for, and it would vindicate his work in Stalin’s eyes.

The invasion of June 22, 1941, and consequent massive losses in Soviet men and materiel depressed Maisky but he took heart from his meetings with Churchill, who never seems to have doubted final victory. After Pearl Harbor in December of that year, and as winter set in along the front, depression turned to hope and then, in early 1942, to optimism. By now Maisky was using his diplomatic skills to press for a second front, though in mid-February 1942 he allowed himself to think a second front in the west might not even be necessary:

For as long as our successes remain reasonably modest, the reserves of the ruling class will keep silent. But what if the Red Army starts approaching Berlin? And on their own to boot? A nightmare! Cold sweat! And such a situation is possible: 1942, 1943. If our calculations prove justified (there are good grounds for them), the Red Army might reach Berlin alone, before England and the USA. To avoid this, the English might race to open a second front …

—though he conceded he was probably being over-optimistic. Indeed fortune continued to favour Germany until Stalingrad. But Maisky’s prediction was prematurely correct.

In Moscow they were coming to believe that Britain and the USA were not only prevaricating on the idea of any cross-channel second front, but perhaps half-pleased that the USSR was bleeding itself white. And of course neither side trusted the other not to do a deal with Hitler. Molotov now asked Litvinov and Maisky to cease pressing for a second front. Gorodetsky’s contextual comments at this point (March 1942) are interesting:

The puzzling shift in the Soviet position has been either overlooked or misconstrued by Western scholars, who have often attributed the rumours of a separate peace to Stalin’s attempts to scare and “blackmail” the Western powers into further commitment … It is conceivable (and there are indeed indications of the fact) that in desperation Stalin resorted to the same tactics as he had employed in the spring of 1939 and considered an approach to the Germans through Beria. The essence of this would have been cessation of hostilities with Germany by May 1942, coupled with the bait that Russia might join the war against the West by the end of 1943. The reward for the Russians would have been the reinstatement of the territorial arrangements of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, supplemented by the allocation of spheres of influence in the Balkans, and most likely even in Greece. This may explain the nervousness of both Litvinov and Maisky, and cryptic comments in the diary (as well as the prolonged silences).

Gorodetsky’s full apparatus criticus will appear only in the forthcoming and massive complete edition, but what he writes here seems persuasive merely on the basis of what one knows from many sources including Pavel Sudoplatov’s Special Tasks, the compelling insider account of the NKVD’s “wet-work” or death squads—Sudoplatov ran them. He was close to Beria and it’s clear from his book alone that Beria was the most flexible geo-politician in Stalin’s court. For instance (and as is now well known), in the early 1950s Beria wanted to negotiate with the West for a neutral and united Germany in the heart of Europe but couldn’t get the idea past the Politburo.

Maisky, who liked and admired Churchill and often met with him, had a long meeting with him on March 16, 1942, with Eden present. One learns some interesting things about Churchill from Maisky’s diary, and they’re not always edifying (which is refreshing). Conversation roamed over the world, including India: “In general,” Churchill told Maisky:

the Indians are not a historic nation. Who has not conquered them? Whoever came to India from the north became her master. Throughout their history the Indians have barely ever enjoyed true independence. Look at the Indian villages: each stands on a hill. Where did the hill come from? Each village has been building its mud huts for centuries, for millennia. Every year the rainy season washes the huts away. The old ones are replaced by new ones from the same earth. In turn they, too, are washed away. And thus from one generation to another. As a result, the hills have grown higher and higher. What kind of people is it that has not been able to invent something better over the course of millennia?

Churchill, Maisky noted, took a sip of wine and continued with even more irritation:

I’m prepared to leave India this very moment. We won’t be living there in any case. But what would happen then? You might think: liberty, prosperity, the development of culture and science … How wrong you would be! If we leave, fighting will break out everywhere, there’ll be a civil war. Eventually the Moslems will become masters, because they are warriors, while the Hindus are windbags. Yes, windbags! Oh, of course, when it comes to fine speeches, skilfully balanced resolutions, and legalistic castles in the air, the Hindus are real experts! They’re in their element! But when it comes to business, when something must be decided on quickly, implemented, executed—here the Hindus say “pass”. Here they immediately reveal their internal flabbiness.

Listening to him, Maisky says, he thought, “Of course, Churchill is a considerable man and a major statesman. And yes, he is 67 years old. But nonetheless, something of the small boy lives on in him: Iran is a toy he likes, while India is a toy he dislikes.”

Churchill was brutally frank in his conversations with Maisky, who was with him soon after the Libyan port of Tobruk capitulated with the surrender of tens of thousands of Allied troops. This event was unrelated to the earlier and successful 241-day Allied defence of Tobruk (the “Siege of Tobruk”), also in terms of the units located there. Months after that siege was lifted, Rommel struck Tobruk a second time, quickly overwhelming the port. In response to Maisky’s inquiries regarding the circumstances:

Churchill turned a deep shade of red, as always happens with him when he is very angry, and said that Tobruk was a shameful page in the history of the British military. In Tobruk there were sufficient troops, ammunition and supplies (enough for three months!). Tobruk could have resisted no worse than Sevastopol, but the Tobruk commander, the South African General Klopper, got cold feet and waved the white flag 24 hours after the German attack began.

Maisky blurted out, “I’d have shot a general like that on the spot!” “I’d have done the same,” Churchill responded, “But just you try!” He added that, to the South Africans (including Smuts), it was “Hands off the heroes of Tobruk!”

On May 2, 1943, Maisky visited George Bernard Shaw and his wife. “Mrs Shaw is in a bad way: she has severe curvature of the spine and was all twisted. She’s become very small and crooked.” Shaw’s problem, on the other hand, seems to have been cerebral: “I made a discovery,” he told Maisky. “Stalin is the most important Fabian in history!” “How’s that?” Maisky laughed (perhaps at Shaw). “Because Stalin took the socialism that the Fabians merely dreamed and nattered about and turned it into reality.” Maisky clearly thought that was vintage Shaw, because he says he positively roared with laughter. Then Shaw got onto another hobby-horse, Pavlov and his poor mistreated dogs. It wasn’t so much the vivisection that worried Shaw, though he didn’t like that, it was that he, Shaw, had discovered the conditioned reflex years ago and deserved the credit. “I roared once more,” Maisky tells us.

Thinking of the Webbs as well, Maisky sums the four of them up: “Two couples. Our contemporaries. Comrades in their vision of the world, comrades in the struggle. Friends. Both world-famous. Both of similar age. In both, life’s candle is burning right to the end. Sad.” Unfortunately there is no irony here. Maisky knew what irony was, but generally avoided it. As a female revolutionary in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes says to the central character whose irony has just annoyed her, “Razumov, revolutionists hate irony.”

A few days later H.G. Wells came for lunch. He was in a bad way too:

His hands shake, he can barely walk. Just one flight of steps to the first floor and he is completely out of breath. Occasionally you can see in his eyes the sparkle of the author of War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, but for the most part they are clouded by a deathly film.

Wells’s views on Lenin, whom he had met in 1920 and viewed critically, had undergone a sea-change: “What a giant that Lenin was! He was right then, and I was wrong!” As Maisky describes it, “Then the subject turned to Stalin, and Wells remarked: ‘I like “Uncle Joe” very much. He’s a great man. I’m not even sure who’s greater, Lenin or Stalin. It would be truer to say that each is No. 1 in his own way.’” Maisky adds, “Well, that’s progress: Wells is acknowledging Stalin’s greatness now, without waiting for 23 years to elapse.”

I have no doubt that Wells said these things to Maisky that day and meant them, but it’s certain that the entire scene in the diary was written not just for the record but for the invisible reader looking over Maisky’s shoulder, who had had two of Maisky’s embassy people shot and Maisky himself locked up in a confessional box before letting him off with a warning. Did Maisky keep a loaded automatic in the top drawer of his office desk for use on himself? In his position, one would.

On May 27, 1943, Maisky and his wife climbed into their Soviet version of a Buick and drove to visit Lloyd George in the Surrey village of Churt. The former prime minister had become decrepit and irritable—“This is not the Lloyd George I used to know,” Maisky thought. They drank tea and chatted on various topics:

We also spoke about Poland. Lloyd George supports our position and criticises the Poles. He recalled how many troubles the Poles caused in the last war. “There wasn’t one sensible man among them!” he exclaimed. “All dreamers, megalomaniacs, impudent aggressors! … The best of the bunch was Paderewski, but he was clueless when it came to politics and weak in character. Egged on by Clemenceau, the Poles lost all restraint and refused to listen to me or Wilson. The consequences are now plain to see.”

Maisky’s time in London was drawing to a close. His diplomatic achievements were considerable, well summarised in Gorodetsky’s contextual notes and illustrated by the diaries themselves. He used his influence to back Litvinov’s efforts towards mutual security in Europe, and while these were unsuccessful they were correct in retrospect. During the period of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact (a direct consequence of the failure of Litvinov’s efforts which Moscow had given up on because of British coolness and continually mixed signals), Maisky fought to keep relations between his country and Britain on a better-than-hostile basis, a dangerous endeavour and one which reflected his own largely pro-British sentiments during that period. He organised meetings in Moscow between British and Soviet leaders that were diplomatically significant if not always fruitful. His reports back to Moscow on his meetings with members of the British government, and the way he spun those reports, can be seen as largely in Britain’s own interests (which was no doubt one important reason he was later charged with being a British agent). He was undoubtedly the best ambassador the USSR could have had in that embassy, which was why he survived in the role for so long. He had all the personal contacts and the requisite understanding.

Maisky was recalled to Moscow in June 1943 as a consequence of a bitter clash between Churchill and Stalin over the USSR’s exclusion from strategic planning and post-war arrangements then being discussed by Churchill and Roosevelt. Litvinov was recalled too. Both were appointed deputy foreign minister but then sidelined to unimportant work (though Maisky was at the Yalta summit, interpreting for Stalin, and briefly at Potsdam). Now it was destination oblivion. Maisky’s connections had been mainly with Conservatives, but from mid-1945 Britain’s Labour Party (worse in Stalin’s eyes) was in power and Maisky knew fewer of them, so he was no longer useful.

In the late 1940s, as relations with the West deteriorated and the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign intensified, his fears, never far below the surface, became uppermost. One day an old British acquaintance turned up unannounced at the Moscow apartment and Maisky refused to let him in. “Please go away,” he whispered in urgent tones. “You will only endanger me if you try to see me.” He was now doing minor research work in the prestigious Russian Academy of Science.

By 1952 he was under suspicion again, and more seriously. Molotov told Khrushchev he thought Maisky had probably been recruited as an English spy. On February 19, 1953, he was arrested and interrogated, accused of “high treason”. He confessed at once—yes, Churchill had recruited him. It’s always possible, of course—perhaps 5 per cent. Maisky claimed later that his confession was cowardice, a weak moment. And why would Churchill have needed to recruit Maisky, who was well disposed, rarely disagreeing with anything Churchill said, passing it all back to Moscow? … a problem in itself, to a suspicious mind.

In the two weeks between his arrest and the death of Stalin, Maisky, now sixty-nine, was subjected to thirty-six interrogations in the basement of the Lubyanka. The amnesty that followed Stalin’s death did not apply to Maisky, who was still in the same cell a year later on his seventieth birthday, January 7, 1954, writing a poem for his wife Agniya:

My darling! Today, on this cherished day,

From my half-dark room

I call my greetings to you

And in my mind hug you to my bosom.

Thank you so much, my dearest,

For all the happiness you gave me.

His biggest problem was his alleged association in the late 1940s and early 1950s with Beria. Details of that association will likely forever be unclear. Maisky himself gave conflicting accounts, always minimising the relationship. Gorodetsky ventures deep into this enticing fog in one of the most interesting sections of the book.

Maisky’s diaries were used against him to prove excessive intimacy with Churchill and Eden, no hard thing, and there was the microfilm of the British White Book of 1939 on the triple negotiations between the Soviet Union, Britain and France, never made available to Moscow, allegedly hidden by Maisky from the Soviet government, but found in the belongings he’d brought back from England. He claimed the microfilm had been given him by English friends of the Soviet Union, put away and forgotten. The charge of treason was eventually dropped, replaced by “abuse of power and privileges while at his ambassadorial post”. He was given a sentence of six years’ internal exile, a sentence he never had to serve. Times had changed. Promptly pardoned by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, he was allowed to return home, remaining under a cloud until finally rehabilitated and readmitted to membership of the CPSU in 1960.

The next decade and more was devoted to his memoirs. It should be put to Maisky’s credit (and there are many things to be put on that side of the ledger) that he had the courage to sign a petition, along with the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov and others, against attempts to rehabilitate Stalin.

Together with his wife he spent most of his last years at their dacha outside Moscow, tending the garden and writing. His errors, whatever they amounted to, had been forgiven but not forgotten. He died on September 3, 1975. It’s natural to sympathise with people like Maisky, whose fortune and circumstances were inherently adverse. Gorodetsky, to his credit, never moralises, just relates.