Newspaper Article

The Maisky Diaries review -- Britain's high and mighty in conversation with Stalin's man

Steele, Jonathan

2016

Overview

In 1942 Maisky finds Churchill philosophical about India's future. \"If we leave, there'll be civil war,\" the PM tells him. \"Eventually, the Moslems will become masters because they are warriors while the Hindus are windbags. Yes, windbags ... When something must be decided on quickly, implemented and executed, they immediately reveal their internal flabbiness.\" Maisky comments in his diary afterwards: \"I listened to him and couldn't help thinking: Of course, Churchill is a considerable man and a major statesman ... but something of the small boy lives on in him: Iran is a toy he likes while India is a toy he dislikes.\" Maisky's fluent English, sharp political nous and undiplomatically forthright opinions earned him unprecedented access to the power brokers. He was helped, too, by the Soviet Union's central role as a strategic player in the struggle against Hitler, travelling a long way from his origins as a son of teachers in the Siberian city of Omsk. His father was of Jewish Polish origin, a fact that Maisky tended to conceal. (Viktor Gollancz, the publisher, remembered that Maisky used to tell hilarious Jewish stories \"which he called Armenian and loved listening to mine which he called Armenian, too\". But Chamberlain had a nose for detecting these things, once describing Maisky as a \"clever little Jew\".) Always fluent in words, he wrote several volumes of his autobiography in retirement, which Gabriel Gorodetsky, the Israeli scholar who has edited the Maisky Diaries, describes as contentious, misleading and coloured by hindsight and self-censorship. The volume under review does not stem from these books, but from Gorodetsky's good fortune in the early 1990s. While conducting a research project on Soviet policy towards Palestine he was unexpectedly handed Maisky's diaries by the Russian foreign ministry's archivist. Running to more than half a million words, they make three volumes in Russian. But Gorodetsky has boiled them down in English to one thick volume, with fascinating photographs from Maisky's private collection. Gorodetsky perhaps exaggerates the contrast between the diaries and the later autobiography. The diaries are equally self-serving, clearly written with an eye to posterity as well as to the Soviet security services who could confiscate them at any moment. Their value lies in their freshness and the perspicacity of Maisky's comments about the English.

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Beria, Lavrenti / Gorodetsky, Gabriel / Litvinov, Maxim / Maisky, Ivan / Webb, Beatrice