Reaching through the Iron Curtain

In the pages of the Kremlin’s secret diary, Pavel Stroilov discovers what Labour’s Soviet sympathisers said when they thought no one was listening

It is almost 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall — and still the truth keeps trickling out of Moscow. The Soviets, like the Nazis, were meticulous note-keepers and there is decades worth of material still to be uncovered. At first, only those who went through the filing cabinets could compile the untold stories of the USSR. But now that these records are being digitised, scrutinising them becomes a lot easier. And this is how I came across the extraordinary diaries of Anatoly Chernyaev.

For years he was the Soviet Union’s contact man with the West. But from the 1970s onwards he met the British politicians who went looking for favours behind the Iron Curtain — and recorded every encounter in his journal. He was a deputy in the Soviet International Department (a successor to the Comintern) and latterly an adviser to Gorbachev himself.