In 2013, when the world found out that Angela Merkel had been the target of American wiretapping, Western journalists seemed ready for the fainting couches. The United States, it turned out, had used its embassy in Berlin to house its eavesdropping operation. But how naïve could these journalists be? Surely official-cover espionage is one of the more open secrets in the intelligence world.
It’s also one source of diplomacy’s enduring mystique. Its practitioners, whether spies or not, work behind a curtain of intrigue. When they leave a written record, we finally get a glimpse behind it. The Maisky Diaries are the legacy of Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to Great Britain—formally to the Court of St James’s—during World War II; and this volume, the first of a planned three, comes from primary material Gabriel Gorodetsky discovered in Russian archives.
It covers the period from 1932 to 1943, when Maisky held the ambassadorship in London. The first thing you notice is the stereotypical glamour of diplomatic life: Maisky’s tenure was one of cigar-and-brandy sessions and chancery parties. Like Horace Walpole, he seemed to know everyone in London, and though Maisky might have lacked flair and charisma, he could call upon the major figures of politics, the press, business, and the arts if needed.
The entries reveal no mere socialite, however: Maisky was a sage observer of European affairs, seeing clearly what many of his contemporaries could not. While the government of Neville Chamberlain was assuring itself of its own wisdom, Maisky was predicting that Adolf Hitler would grow more aggressive. And his failed push for an Anglo-Soviet alliance against Germany makes him appear an odd but sympathetic figure to the modern reader: a Communist open to cooperation with the West—although we shouldn’t forget that another aim in destroying fascism was to secure Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states.
Maisky was wrong on many occasions—days before Hitler invaded Russia he recorded his skepticism about such an attack—but his judgment often proved impeccable. Writing in February 1938 he reflected on the crackdown in Germany’s Ministry of Defense, a move that put Hitler in direct control of the Wehrmacht. Maisky’s conclusion: “More purposeful attempts to seize Austria and, perhaps, Czechoslovakia are also very probable.” Then there’s this prescient item, from an entry dated March 1, 1938: “The events of the next six to eight months will prove critical, and future historians may one day mark 1938 as a decisive year in the development of foreign politics in our era.”
The quotations are even more jarring when you consider that men like Anthony Eden were assuring Maisky, in private, that Germany would wither on the vine. Winston Churchill, too, in his meetings with Maisky, was confident Hitler wouldn’t move against Czechoslovakia. It’s frustrating to admit that, on these occasions, a Soviet Communist was more perceptive about one of the great menaces of the 20th century than eminent British Tories.
In the 1930s, British foreign policy was still a matter of balancing the continental powers, particularly France and Germany; and if we avoid the arrogance that hindsight can bring, we should also remember that Neville Chamberlain genuinely thought he was securing a course for peace in Europe. Britain knew how weak its armed forces were—its army, especially—and this knowledge, as Lloyd George told Maisky, was doubtless a factor in Chamberlain’s “deal” with Hitler at Munich.
Maisky, however, had nothing but contempt for such calculations, coming across at certain times here as a kind of thirties neoconservative. Indeed, it’s hard at times to discern that Maisky was a Communist at all, or that he represented a brutal, totalitarian government. His comportment in these pages is measured; his language free of cant. Even his looks—the well-fed, portly body, the kindly eyes, the authentic smile—will strike the reader as very different from the dour, self-defensive faces of that era’s most prominent Soviets.
How much of this was innate in Maisky or due to exposure to other societies? Given Ivan Maisky’s background as a Menshevik—that is to say, a revolutionary opponent of the Bolsheviks—it’s extraordinary that he landed any significant role in Stalin’s service, much less a plum embassy. But when, in 1939, Maxim Litvinov resigned as foreign minister after a forced demotion, Soviet foreign policy turned a darker corner: Now under the direction of Vyacheslav Molotov, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began replacing older, wiser diplomats with younger fanatics.
Maisky remained in place but the nature of his job changed: Ambassadors were no longer charmers with a certain independence; their function became (in Molotov’s words) “simply to transmit what they are told to pass on.” This foreshadowed Maisky’s arrest for treason after the war, an episode in which he only narrowly escaped being shot. If these diaries reveal a man of comparative nuance, it isn’t surprising that the Soviet state eventually found reason to ostracize him.
Robert Wargas is a writer in New York.
