John Jolliffe

The powers that were

Ivan Maisky’s diaries contain sharp insights on Chamberlain, Churchill — and the ‘blind moles’ in the House of Lords who in 1938 still proclaimed Hitler Europe’s saviour

issue 12 September 2015

Ivan Maisky was the Russian ambassador in London from 1932 to 1943, and his knowledge of London, and affection for it, went back to his time there as a political exile from 1912 to 1917. Even after the multitude of books published on the subject, these diaries throw new light from a fresh angle on the lead-up to 1939, and the subsequent course of the war.

Maisky’s commitment to communism was total. On 4 November 1934 he writes:

Today, any man, even an enemy, can see that Lenin is an historical Mont Blanc… a radiant guiding peak in the thousand-year evolution of humanity, while Gandhi is just a cardboard mountain who shone with a dubious light for some ten years before disintegrating.

After a House of Commons debate in July of that year, during which both Churchill and Austen Chamberlain declared themselves ‘friends’ of the Soviet Union, Maisky considered that the

skill at facing the facts, whether pleasant or unpleasant, is characteristic of British politicians, and finally overcomes their enmity towards us on grounds of politics and class… and enables them to derive from us what profit they can.

Later, in March 1938, he attended a debate in the House of Lords:

They looked like flies in milk.

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