It was unheard-of for Soviet ambassadors to keep personal diaries during Stalin’s rule, for on return to the USSR those diaries would be examined by the relevant authorities and could prove fatal to the diarist. Ivan Maisky kept very detailed diaries over his period as Soviet Ambassador to Great Britain (1932 to 1943) and years later used them, but very selectively, as the basis for a series of memoirs. Only following their discovery by Gabriel Gorodetsky in the archives of the Russian Foreign Ministry in more recent times have they been made available to the world, first in Russian and, just a few weeks ago, in English.
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.”