The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James's, 1932-1943

565 Pages·2015·7.23 MB·English

by  Ivan Maisky

Copyright © 2015 Gabriel Gorodetsky All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in
part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.
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Typeset in Minion Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd Printed in Great Britain
by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data Maiskii, I. M. (Ivan Mikhailovich), 1884–1975.
The Maisky diaries : red ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932–1943 / edited by Gabriel
Gorodetsky.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-18067-1 (alk. paper)
1. Maiskii, I. M. (Ivan Mikhailovich), 1884–1975. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Diplomatic history. 3.
Soviet Union—Foreign relations—1917–1945. 4. Ambassadors—Great Britain—Diaries. 5. Ambassadors
—Soviet Union—Diaries. 6. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—Great Britain—Sources. 7. Great Britain—
Foreign relations—Soviet Union—Sources. I. Gorodetsky, Gabriel, 1945-editor. II. Title. III. Title: Red
ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932–1943.
D754.R9M28 2015
327.47041092—dc23
2015016351
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Making of a Soviet Diplomat
Prologue
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
End of an Era: Maisky’s Recall
The Price of Fame: A Late Repression
Illustration Credits
Index
Acknowledgements
This diary is published with the permission of the Scheffer-Voskressenski family – Ivan Maisky’s heirs. I
am most grateful for their cooperation and assistance in the preparation of this volume. I should also like to
thank the Russian Foreign Ministry, the custodians of the Maisky diaries, for allowing me access to the
original diaries, and for their help with archival sources and photographs. Particular gratitude is due to
Professor Itamar Rabinovich, former president of Tel Aviv University, for his assistance in raising a
generous grant towards the costs of the translation of the diary into English.
Few publishers today would enthusiastically embrace a project which involves the publication of three
large volumes of a heavily annotated diary. I am grateful to John Donatich, the director of Yale University
Press, and his team for their continuing unstinting support. I owe a special debt to Robert Baldock, the
managing director of the London office of Yale University Press (who had commissioned my earlier book,
Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia), for his abiding faith in me. No one could wish
for a more perceptive, knowledgeable and supportive editor. It was he who convinced me, in addition to the
complete three-volume edition, to produce a single compendium of excerpts from Maisky’s diaries, which
would be accessible to a wider audience. The result, a lavish book, beautifully produced, is a testament to
his unrivalled skills.
This book is the fruit of more than ten years of extensive research. I was most fortunate to profit from a
series of generous fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Institute for Advanced
Studies at Freiburg, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. They provided most conducive
conditions for pursuing my work, and a fertile ground for testing and sharing my ideas with leading fellow
historians. The lion’s share of my work, however, was done under the auspices of All Souls College,
Oxford. It was Isaiah Berlin, a legendary fellow of the college, who first introduced me to Oxford in 1969
and encouraged me to write my dissertation there; the circle was miraculously closed for me when I was
first offered a visiting fellowship at All Souls in 2006 and subsequently elected as a fellow. I can hardly
find the proper words to describe the friendships I have forged at All Souls, and the challenging yet
congenial environment I have encountered at the college – undoubtedly a guardian of scholarship in its
purest form. Sir John Vickers, the warden of the college, and John Davis, the former warden, made me feel
at home and spared no effort in providing me with the utmost assistance and encouragement.
I was extremely fortunate to have Tatiana Sorokina and Oliver Ready as translators of the diary. Their
combined efforts have produced a meticulous and elegant translation that is convincingly idiomatic yet
faithful to Maisky’s unique literary prose. I was equally fortunate in having Clive Liddiard as my copy-
editor. His succinct yet wise and punctilious interventions improved the text considerably, as did his
mastery of the Russian language and familiarity with Slavic and East European cultures.
Special appreciation is due to Hillel Adler, who initially helped me set up a most sophisticated database
which allowed us to tame and master a voluminous body of archival sources. Dr Ruth Brown was equally
helpful in organizing the glossary of the more than a thousand people mentioned in the diary. Dr James
Womack produced some exquisite translations from the Russian of various letters in Maisky’s private
archives.
Finally, Ruth Herz, my wife, friend and companion, would be the first to admit that, rather than a
burden in our life, the years spent with Maisky represented a fascinating joint journey.
1. Portrait of Maisky.
Introduction
The unique and fascinating diary of Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London from 1932 to
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1943, is one of the few kept by a Soviet dignitary in the 1930s and during the Second World War. Stalin
discouraged his entourage from putting pen to paper and would not allow notes to be taken during meetings
at the Kremlin. Keeping a diary, we are reminded, was ‘a risky undertaking when people scared to death
were burning papers and archives. Diaries were particularly vulnerable, sought after by the police when
they searched the dwellings of suspected “enemies of the people”. ’ Indeed, Maisky’s journals were
eventually seized by the Ministry for State Security, together with his vast personal archive, following his
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arrest in February 1953 (two weeks before Stalin’s death) on accusations of spying for Britain. Pardoned
in 1955, Maisky led a protracted – yet ultimately futile – campaign to retrieve them. His pleas were turned
down by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs on the grounds that the diary ‘contained various official material’.
He was given only one year of limited access to it while he wrote his memoirs, but was denied access to any
other archival sources. The diary remained inaccessible to researchers for decades.
Serendipity often lies at the heart of scholarly discoveries. In 1993, under the aegis of both the Israeli
and the Soviet foreign ministries, I launched a research project which culminated in the joint official
publication of documents on Israeli-Soviet relations. It is hard to describe my excitement when, while
seeking information on Maisky’s involvement in the Soviet decision to support the partition plan for
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Palestine in 1947, the archivist at the Russian Foreign Ministry emerged from the stacks with Maisky’s
voluminous diary for the eventful year of 1941. No personal document of such breadth, value and size had
emerged from the Soviet archives to throw fresh light on the Second World War and its origins. Flipping
through the volume, I was struck by its immediacy and frankness, by Maisky’s astute and penetrating
insights, and by his superb prose. The diary comprises over half a million words, minutely and candidly
depicting the observations, activities and conversations of the ubiquitous Soviet ambassador in London.
Maisky typed his daily impressions in the evening, though there are also handwritten entries (remarkably
missing from the Russian edition) which were often written away from the scrutinizing ‘oeil de Moscou’
within his office at the embassy.
Recognizing the distinctive value of the diary, Yale University Press generously agreed to publish it in
its entirety, with my extensive commentary, in three volumes. I was, however, encouraged to produce this
abridged version, to make it accessible to a wider audience. Making the selections for the compendium
volume (25 per cent of the original diary and of my commentary) was particularly painful, as the text left
out proved to be just as fascinating and compelling as that which was included. My guidelines were to
retain the character and flow of the narrative. This volume is therefore stripped of the vast referential
apparatus which will shortly be available to the interested reader in the full three-volume version.
Abridgements are indicated by an initial space followed by ellipsis and a subsequent space. Wherever
Maisky himself uses ellipsis, there is no initial space. When Maisky employs a word (or phrase) in English,
that word appears in italics; whenever Maisky underlines a phrase for emphasis, an underscore is used here.
The process of having the diaries declassified and then published in Russia (a legal prerequisite for any
publication of such documents in the West) was long and arduous. The editorial work on the Russian
version was shared between the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, under the
guidance of its director, Alexander Oganovich Chubarian, and Vitaly Yurevich Afiani, director of the
Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which houses Maisky’s vast personal archives. I am much
indebted to both for their cooperation. Their competent edition nonetheless gives the strong sense of being
an official tome, and tends to uphold the traditional Russian historiography of the events leading up to the
Second World War.
The commentary and annotations in the present volume bear no resemblance to those in the Russian
edition. The initial temptation was to reduce any editorial intervention to the minimum and allow Maisky to
tell his own tale. However, a detailed contextual commentary seemed indispensable, considering the
repressive conditions under which Maisky kept his diary – forcing him to leave many blank spots in the
otherwise rich and informative account – when the storm battered the gates of his own embassy. Fearful and
concerned that the diary might be confiscated and denied to future generations, Maisky in fact kept at least
three copies of it. The commentary is therefore by no means confined to the common practice of providing
the reader with the basic auxiliary tools. It involves juxtaposing Maisky’s entries with the voluminous
correspondence in his private archives (which I unearthed in Moscow), as well as with the telegrams he sent
to the Russian Foreign Ministry, his own apologetic memoirs written with hindsight following his arrest,
and a multitude of other archival sources. Detailed references to the sources used here will be available in
the extended three-volume edition of the diary. I was also privileged to gain access to Maisky’s personal
photo albums: some of the images (many of which feature and reflect the events described in the diary) are
reproduced here. They often convey what thousands of words fail to do. I am most grateful to Dr Alexei D.
Voskressenski, Maisky’s great-nephew and heir, for allowing me to share with readers Maisky’s incredibly
personal, and at times intimate, gaze.
2. A sample page from the diary – recording a meeting with Eden, 10 June 1941.
Maisky’s diary is not the typical Soviet diary, a vehicle to ‘self-perfection’, which was encouraged by
the regime as a means of political education and transformation. It is a personal diary, which would have
been classified by the Soviet authorities as ‘inherently bourgeois’, revolving as it does largely around the
theme of the self, rather than being a self-critical effort to become a good communist. It is a testament to the
pivotal role played by personal friendships, conflicts and rivalries in early Soviet politics, transcending
controversies over policy and ideology. It confirms that Soviet society and politics cannot be appropriately
described without resorting to the human factor that exposes the unknown personal bonds. While Maisky’s
commitment to communism is manifestly proclaimed, he is fully immersed in the tradition of diary-writing
among the Western ‘bourgeois’ intelligentsia. In fact, regardless of the obvious cultural differences, it
resembles Pepys’s diary in its astute observation of the British political and social scene, spiced with
anecdotes and gossip. Like Churchill, Maisky surprisingly hails the role of ‘great men’ in history. He
further acknowledges the uniqueness of events, rather than following the Marxist interpretation, which
subsumes the individual into larger social patterns. Far from dismissing ‘the “personal contribution” to the
great general cause’, Maisky openly argued in a letter to Georgy Chicherin, the commissar for foreign
affairs, that one could ‘scarcely deny that “personality” plays or can play a certain role in history. At times,
4
even not a minor one.’ It was ‘enough to remember’, he reminded Chicherin, ‘what Ilyich meant for our
revolution’.
Maisky was obviously conscious of his own central role in shaping history. Describing a crucial
meeting with Churchill in September 1941, when the fate of Moscow hung in the air, he wrote: