The Maisky diaries

How excited the historian Gabriel Gorodetsky must have been to get access to 1,500 pages of hand-written notes by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London from 1932 to 1943. The document was exceptional for many reasons: the importance of Maisky’s diplomatic mission, which began just when Hitler’s expected accession to power heralded war in Europe; the situation in the Soviet Union, where purges would soon decimate armed forces officers and the diplomatic corps; and because of Maisky’s personality — though a revolutionary activist, he was a man of great character and culture (including writing plays in verse).

At first the Soviet government expected Maisky to be “a more accomplished diplomat and a less ardent communist” than his predecessor. In fact, he was to play a leading role in the European tragedy, suggesting ideas and diplomatic projects to his British counterparts, which he would attribute to them when reporting to Moscow. By building contacts even in the royal family and financial circles, Maisky hoped to dissipate the mutual distrust between Britain and Russia — each suspected the other of wanting to force it into conflict with Germany. The passage describing the “scandalous” complicity that developed between Churchill and Maisky on 16 November 1937 contrasts with the British establishment’s strong bias towards Germany at the time. The Munich Agreement, concluded the following year at a European conference to which the Soviet Union was not even invited, seemed to confirm Moscow’s suspicions on this point, and led to its strategic turnaround and the thunderbolt of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

Gorodetsky’s commentary, written with the clarity that still distinguishes some of our best historians, reminds us that Stalinist terror discouraged Soviet diplomats from writing too much, especially from keeping a diary, in the 1930s. This makes Maisky’s diaries, on which Gorodetsky has worked for the last 15 years, all the more precious — in fact a unique document. They are a record of the efforts of a Soviet diplomat who — even when he feared being recalled to Moscow for consultation, risking execution or internment like a fair number of his colleagues (62% of Soviet diplomats were victims of the purges) — went on trying to reconcile his country’s interests with those of the major western powers. Reading them, it is clear this was not always easy.

by Gabriel Gorodetsky and Ivan Maïsky