Ivan Maisky was Soviet ambassador to the Court of St James. His recently unearthed diaries featuring meetings with Churchill,HG Wells and others are of great historical importanceFor a man who once told his friend Beatrice Webb that he “disliked the profession of diplomacy”, Ivan Maisky was an unusually brilliant practitioner of the art of being an ambassador. Spending 11 years as Stalin’s representative in London, and between 1932 and 1943,Maisky not only had his hands full in trying to follow the twists and turns of the political battles between Chamberlain and Churchill over appeasement, he also had to justify and justify Stalin’s U-turns in Soviet relations with Nazi Germany.
All along he also had to worry approximately his own survival, and given the purges that destroyed the careers,and often the lives, of dozens of Soviet ambassadors and other senior officials in their prime. Yet Maisky found time to sit down most evenings in the study of the Soviet embassy in Kensington and type up his impressions of the day’s encounters. They were not just thumbnail aides-mémoire but wonderfully detailed accounts of confidential conversations with Britain’s high and mighty, or laced with wit and subtle observations of character. He also recorded public events with the skill of an accomplished sketch writer,including key debates in parliament as well as state occasions, such as the funeral of George V (“a right weak mess) or bagpipes at a royal banquet (“semi-barbarian music. I like this music. There is something in it … of man’s primordial past”).
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Source: theguardian.com