I am increasingly convinced that despite everything, Baldwin is still the real leader of the Conservative Party and, consequently, the leader of England and the British Empire. But he is no ordinary leader. H. Macmillan

Harold Maurice Macmillan (1st earl of Stockton), Conservative MP, 1924–29 and 1931–64; parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Supply, 1940–42; undersecretary of state for the colonies, 1942–45.

(Conservative) once told me that Baldwin ‘is our Kutuzov’ (he meant the Kutuzov of L. Tolstoy’s War and Peace).

[In what today would be a routine practice, but was in the 1930s quite uncommon, Maisky diligently cultivated relations with the proprietors and editors of leading newspapers, particularly the more Conservative ones. His intensive correspondence with Garvin,

James Louis Garvin, founder and editor of the Observer, 1908–42.

the editor of the Observer, is a striking example. Maisky would brief Garvin, sometimes in a subtle way and sometimes quite bluntly, about issues which he deemed of sufficient importance to be raised in the paper. Shortly after his return from vacation in Europe, his new initiatives now endorsed by Stalin and Litvinov, he hastily approached Garvin: ‘There is so much to talk about concerning the international situation that one has the desire to discuss many topical questions with a well-informed student of international affairs.’ He would raise a trivial matter, such as a request for Garvin to put him up for membership of the London Library, en passant giving him marks for a recent editorial in which Garvin had put the case for peace ‘very ably and convincingly’, while congratulating him on ‘the magnificent service [he had] done to the cause of peace’. Maisky also did not hesitate to reproach Garvin for a leader which, he feared, was likely to encourage those influential circles in Britain seeking appeasement with Germany and which could create the wrong impression in Germany that Britain was leaving Eastern Europe out in the cold. He was then quick off the mark to congratulate Garvin on a corrective article which appeared the following week in the Observer, further briefing him on topics which he expected Garvin to raise in a second instalment. ‘The attitude of the British press to this question,’ he reassured Garvin, ‘is very important and that is why I feel that “Face to Face” was doubly welcome and timely.’

Garvin papers, 10 March, 12 Dec. 1933, 1 Jan., 20 and 26 Feb., 1935. Maisky paid equal attention to journalists, such as J. Cummings, the political editor of News Chronicle, who were highly critical of the Soviet Union; see VSD, p. 304, and I.M. Maisky, Vospominaniya sovetskogo posla v Anglii (Moscow, 1960), pp. 99–100.

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