V. is in a sour mood. He gives the impression of a man who is not quite himself. Perhaps he has yet to get the Hoare–Laval plan and its consequences out of his system. He is greatly concerned by the Italo-Abyssinian conflict. As far as Germany is concerned, V.’s opinion is as follows. The Locarno powers must first agree among themselves, then ask Hitler a few specific questions, and after that pass the whole package over to Geneva for consideration. V. thinks it impossible to avoid negotiations: the British public would not comprehend a refusal to talk. The negotiations should be used for exposing Hitler. This is the easiest way of educating public opinion.

I asked Ishbel why she had suddenly decided to open a tavern. She replied: ‘It just happened. I drive around the country a great deal and seldom see good taverns in the countryside. So the thought occurred to me: why not open a tavern that will be the envy of all England?’

Litvinov indeed adopted almost verbatim Maisky’s proposals on how to meet the current indifference to Central and Eastern Europe in his outline plan for the Geneva session, which he sent Stalin in early September.

Quoted in Dullin, Men of Influence, p. 129.

Nevertheless, Maisky remained frustrated throughout 1936 about his failure to bring about any change in the British attitude. ‘Europe,’ he wrote to Beaverbrook, ‘is at the cross roads just now … and I am afraid that the eleventh hour chance of avoiding war will not be taken.’

RAN f.1702 op.4 d.854 l.1, 4 May 1936.

He was particularly ‘perturbed’ to find Eden noncommittal and evasive, having practically dropped the demands for an Eastern Locarno in the fresh approaches to Hitler.

TNA FO 371 19904 C3231/4/18; DVP, 1936, XIX, doc. 142, 28 April. See also Corbin to Flandin, in P. Renouvin and J.B. Duroselle (eds), Documents diplomatiques francais (hereafter DDF), 2 Serie, II, Doc. 125.

‘It seems to me,’ he wrote to Bernard Shaw shortly afterwards, that ‘the greatest sin of modern statesmen is vacillation and ambiguity of thought and action. This is the weakness which before long may land us into [sic] war. Happily Stalin is possessed, in the highest degree, of the opposite qualities!’

RAN f.1702 op.4 d.1184 l.5, 4 May 1936.

In vain he sought new ways of breaking the stalemate. Attempts to enlist Labour’s support registered only partial success. During Litvinov’s visit to London, lunch at the embassy with Attlee, Greenwood

Arthur Greenwood, deputy leader of the Labour Party, 1935–54; member of the War Cabinet, and minister without portfolio, 1940–42.

and Dalton proved to be a non-starter: Dalton seemed to be fascinated only by Rozenberg,

Marsel Izrailevich Rozenberg, deputy general secretary of the League of Nations, 1934–36, ambassador to the Spanish Republic, 1936; recalled in 1937, arrested and shot in 1938; rehabilitated posthumously.

Litvinov’s representative in Geneva, ‘a small slightly hunchbacked Jew, with a cruel mouth’.

Pimlott, Political Diary of Hugh Dalton, p. 200.

Beatrice Webb found it awkward that Attlee proposed a toast to Maisky, who, despite being a foreign ambassador, was hailed ‘as a colleague’ at political meetings he organized with the leaders of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress at his residence.

Webb, diary, 27 May 1936, p. 6174.

Maisky even preached, to no avail, his own ideas on peace during an address to the Liberal Summer School at Oxford, widely reported in the press.

The Times, 3 August 1936; Richard S. Grayson, Liberals, International Relations, and Appeasement: The Liberal Party, 1919–1939 (Abingdon, UK, 2001), p. 161.

He further made great efforts to impress the military with Russia’s increasing strength following the extensive reforms of the Red Army. In two well-publicized showings at the Soviet embassy, dignitaries were exposed to a full feature-length film of the Red Army’s innovative manoeuvres the previous summer.

For Maisky’s efforts, see correspondence with inter alia Churchill in Churchill papers, CHAR 2/251/53 & 76, 15 & 18 Feb. 1936; also with Cranborne, Elliot and H.G. Wells, RAN f.1702 op.4 d.1399 l.1, d.1192 l.1 & d.1141 l.45, 17 & 18 Feb. 1936.

Paradoxically, his only solace came from the champions of the British Empire, Beaverbrook and Churchill. Beaverbrook favoured a triple alliance with France and the Soviet Union to protect the status quo, motivated by the fear that Germany and Italy were out to absorb the British Empire.

Webb, diary, 6 Aug. 1936, p. 6208.

Though recuperating at his country house from recurring bouts of psychosomatic illness, Beaverbrook was always eager to meet Maisky – ‘for this I would jump at your invitation’ – and the door of his own home was wide open to the Soviet ambassador: ‘If you and her Excellency will come to Cherkley you have only to fix the day and time.’ Their relations became most intimate: when Maisky fell ill in May 1937, Beaverbrook suggested he join him in the sanatorium ‘where I am ill too. It is a most admirable place – the food is good, the sun shines brightly, and everything is comfortable.’

Invitations, Beaverbrook papers, BBK\C\238, 21 July. See also 8 and 29 April, 10 June and 18 July 1936, and 25 May 1937. Maisky left a candid portrait of Beaverbrook in Who Helped Hitler?, pp. 57–8: ‘a short, extremely lively restless man, with a round mobile face and acute, piercing eyes. There poured from his lips a firework torrent of wisecracks,

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opinions, assessments, characterizations of people and events. He did not restrain himself in his expressions.’

Churchill had come to accept collective security as salvation for the Empire. The ‘general outlook merits a chat between ourselves!’ Maisky wrote to Churchill, proposing ‘lunch à deux’. Churchill, as Maisky cabled to Moscow, appeared to be surprisingly frank and forthcoming. He shared the Soviet view both that peace was ‘indivisible’ and that the German danger was an immediate one and could only be confronted by a united Europe. But even Churchill was reserved, warning that the process of re-educating the pacifist public opinion was a long one and excluded military commitment or even the mention of an ‘alliance’. He envisaged instead the fostering of a powerful Anglo-French defensive alliance, which the Russians might be invited to join sometime in 1937, when he expected the German danger to become imminent. ‘We would be complete idiots,’ he told Maisky, ‘were we to deny help to the Soviet Union at present out of a hypothetical danger of socialism which might threaten our children and grandchildren.’ Churchill, as was attested by Sir Maurice Hankey, had ‘buried his violent anti-Russian complex … and is apparently a bosom friend of M. Maisky’. Yet, as Maisky ominously reported to Litvinov, Churchill appeared to be most concerned about Russia’s domestic affairs. Little did he know that Churchill’s belief in the strength of Russia had been seriously shaken by an obscure book he had just read – Uncle Give Us Bread, written by a Danish farmer who had spent some time in Russia. From it Churchill gained the indelible impression that Russia might ‘perhaps present only a façade with nothing behind’.

Churchill papers, CHAR 20/252/92, CHAR 20/253/7 & 9 (1936); DVP, 1936, XIX, doc. 115. See also J. Barnes and D. Nicholson (eds), The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery diaries (London, 1988), p. 348. Maisky’s evaluation was used by Litvinov to exert pressure on the French: see Alphand to Flandin, 4 April 1936, in DDF, 2 Serie, II, Doc. 22. M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Companion Vol. V, Part 3, The Coming of War, 1936–1939 (London, 1982), p. 108. Reynolds, ‘Churchill’s writing of history’, p. 238, suggests that in 1936 Churchill definitely leaned towards Franco and ‘the Anti-Red’ forces, but the following year he was already admitting in parliament that ‘if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi-ism, I would choose Communism’.

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