The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s
by Ivan Maisky
(Yale University Press, £25)

IVAN MAISKY was the very model of a modern Soviet diplomat and he was also one of the most successful.

As ambassador to London, he managed to navigate the transition from the traditional and rather cosmopolitan ambassadorial model as an adaptive interpreter of messages favoured under Maxim Litvinov, then head of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, to the more centralised and prescriptive approach demanded by his successor Vyacheslav Molotov.

These 500 pages of selected extracts from his diaries give a clear picture both of the man and the duplicitous nature of the British Establishment in the period 1934 —Maisky in fact took up his post two years earlier — up to 1943.

During this period he had to deal with all the rogues imaginable, from a defunct Ramsay MacDonald and an unhinged Lloyd George to the pro-nazi ministrations of Samuel Hoare, Viscount Halifax and the reptilian Neville Chamberlain.

Edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky, these diary entries demonstrate the desperate efforts of Soviet diplomacy in trying to build a system of collective security against nazism and fascism in the face of British Conservative opinion that dreamed of nudging Hitler and Mussolini into attacking the Soviet Union rather than their own palsied country.

Unlike most of British public opinion, Maisky saw early on the inevitably of war against fascism. He wrote as early as March 17 1935, the day that Hitler introduced compulsory military service, that “the world rushes ever faster and more uncontrollably towards a military catastrophe.”

Even when the Soviet Union had turned the tide militarily after Stalingrad, the British dragged their feet in opening up a second European front, hence arguably hastening Maisky’s recall to Moscow.

In his introduction, Gorodetsky tries to frame Maisky in the same way that liberals lazily interpret composer Dmitri Shostakovich as an internal dissident and sceptic — one of “them.”

A more inquiring reader, though, must wonder what inconvenient entries that totally contradict this jaundiced worldview Gorodetsky decided to leave out.

He constructs this characterisation by insinuating that Maisky was a believer in the “great man” theory of history because, after all, he encountered so many “great men” during his period of service.

Maisky was a Menshevik, whose Menshevism existed well into the Western-allied wars of intervention during the 1918 Russian civil war. But surely it’s to the credit of the Soviet system that it accorded such influence to an individual with such a mixed early revolutionary career?

Like the great composer, Maisky was also one of those millions of people who contributed to the greatest effort to date to create an alternative to capitalist hegemony, experiencing its heady collective successes and its tragic collective mistakes.

Like Shostakovich, Maisky was a true product of the Soviet system as well as being a first-rate diplomat. Certainly, he was one who adroitly placed his own views in the mouths of his various British contacts when necessary in order to emphasise their importance to Stalin and others back home.

But he also experienced the sometimes important, sometimes comic, efforts to establish a new Soviet diplomatic modus operandi, ranging from worries as to whether his communist wife should wear a hat — and if so of what style — in meeting the newly installed George Windsor in 1936, to his irritation at the newly standardised “military” garb that all Soviet diplomats were expected to wear from the mid-1940s onwards.

By its very nature, such a meticulously written diary contains many instances of pathos and humour — from Communist Party general secretary Harry Pollitt’s tears of confusion on hearing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact to an encounter with a gaggle of dim-witted aristocrats who inquire after the health of Lenin in 1934, a decade after his death.

But the most memorable entry of all goes to that raddled anti working-class thug Winston Churchill who, in late 1937, lets rip that: “Trotsky is a perfect devil. He is a destructive … force. I’m wholly for Stalin.”