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. The Archbishop of Canterbury… gave his full and unconditional backing to Chamberlain. Other lords claimed that Hitler was a wonderful man, who by occupying Austria saved the world from another civil war in Europe. The Labour leader, Lord Ponsonby, explained that England should not worry about the League of Nations, and why it was against her interests to assist Czechoslovakia… The mould of ages lies visibly on the House of Lords. Even the air is stale and yellow. The peers are historically blind, like moles, and ready to lick the Nazi leaders’ boots like a beaten dog.

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