The Complete Maisky Diaries, Volumes 1–3 by Gorodetsky Gabriel (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 567 attitudes to Roma also over-simplifies the tendency for the patriarchal and local to trump the class and (American and European colonial) racial prisms Babović insists upon, despite providing a myriad of examples to the contrary. Finally, and unfortunately, there are a number of misspellings in the Yugoslav personal and place names in both the text and index. UCL SSEES Bojan Aleksov Gorodetsky, Gabriel (ed). The Complete Maisky Diaries, Volumes 1–3. Translated by Tatiana Sorokina and Oliver Ready. Annals of Communism. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2017. l + 1595 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £275.00. Ivan Mikhailovich Maiskii was a first generation Soviet diplomat whose most important posting was in London as polpred or ambassador between 1932 and 1943. Maiskii was an unusual personality. His career path into the Bolshevik party was atypical. He tended toward Menshevism and unconventionality. During the Russian Civil War he cast in his lot with an anti-Bolshevik Socialist Revolutionary (SR) government in Samara. Later he fled to Mongolia after Admiral Aleksandr V. Kolchak took power in Omsk in November 1918. Remarkably, Maiskii was able to make his peace with the Bolsheviks, who accepted him into the party though he was never allowed to forget the error of his ways. In the mid-1920s he was posted for the first time to London where he had lived as an exile prior to the Russian Revolution. In 1929 he was named minister in Helsinki before returning to London as ambassador in the autumn of 1932. Maiskii began keeping a dnevnik, or journal in 1934 which he maintained for the next nine years. In itself, the dnevnik was not unusual. Soviet diplomats had three ways to communicate in writing with the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs in Moscow (NKID): numbered despatches and telegrams and a dnevnik which they were expected to maintain and submit periodically to Moscow. The typical journal recorded, often in great detail, meetings with businessmen, diplomats, politicians and journalists, amongst others; and it reported on politics, finance and economics, and any other topics which might be considered of interest to the NKID. These journals are valuable sources for the conversations they recorded (often unavailable from interlocutors preserved in corresponding Western archives), and for perceptive analyses of developments in the countries where Soviet diplomats were stationed. Maiskii’s journal was distinctive in that the ambassador remained at his post for a relatively long period of time and because the author was a good essayist who often recorded SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 568 his personal views and feelings which ventured beyond the strict business of diplomacy. He also had excellent contacts within the British elite of whatever political stripe, so much so that he often exasperated officials in the Foreign Office. He was just too good at his job. The journal entries were sometimes taken verbatim from official numbered reports, or were transformed into numbered despatches to the NKID. Gaps in the journal do not necessarily mean that Maiskii, when he was in London, was not recording the business of his embassy; it means only that he was sending information to Moscow by despatches and/or telegrams. Editor Gabriel Gorodetsky in the opening lines of his introduction writes that Maiskii’s dnevnik was ‘one of the few diaries kept by a Soviet dignitary in the 1930s’ (1, p. xiii), but technically speaking this is untrue. Virtually all Soviet diplomats, from ambassador to third secretary, kept a journal. These are in fact a tribute to the remarkable record-keeping of NKID officials, both abroad and in Moscow. What is particularly interesting is the comparison of Soviet records of conversations and equivalent Western accounts, when they exist. It is often possible, for example, to compare Maiskii’s records of conversations with those of his Foreign Office interlocutors, who were also diligent record keepers. These include the Permanent Undersecretary Sir Robert Vansittart, and the Parliamentary Undersecretary R. A. (Rab) Butler, amongst others. Vansittart was a long-time proponent of an Anglo-Soviet rapprochement, and Butler and Maiskii worked together to prevent a rupture of Anglo-Soviet relations during the Soviet-Finnish ‘Winter War’ (30 November 1939–13 March 1940). As I...