Stalin Digital Archive
Yale University Press
Yale University Press
  • Search
  • Browse
  • My SDA
    • Private Groups
    • Personal Folders
    • Private Group Folders
  • Resources
    • Stalin Digital Archive
    • User Guide
    • FAQ
    • Editor Projects
    • Private Group Tutorials
    • Institutions & Associations
    • Further Reading
  • About SDA
    • Overview & Donors
    • Collections
    • Editorial Board
    • Transliteration Policy
    • Publishers
    • News & Updates
RegisterLog In
Select documents to open Close
CancelOk

Login Required

A personal account is required to access tags, annotations, bookmarks, and all of the other features associated with the MySDA.

Username: (email address)
Password:
Forgot password?
Log In
  • Purchase a subscription
  • Renew your subscription
  • Need help? Contact us
Not registered?
Register for your MySDA account
Login
Cancel

Your subscription has expired.

Click here to renew your subscription

Once your subscription is renewed, you will receive a new activation code that must be entered before you can log in again

Close
Next Document > < Previous DocumentReturn8 April
You must login to do that
Cancel
You must login to do that
Cancel
You must login to do that
Cancel
You must login to do that
Cancel
Save to my libraryClose
8 April
-or-
Cancel Save
Print Close
(Max. 10 Pages at a time)


By checking this box, I agree to all terms and conditions governing print and/or download of material from this archive.
CancelPrint
Export Annotation Close
CancelExport
Annotation Close
Cancel
Export Citation Close
CancelExport
Citation Close
Cancel
Close
CancelOk
Report Close
Please provide the text of your complaint for the selected annotation


CancelReport
/ -1
Stalin Digital Archive
Back to Search
Stalin digital archive
Back to Search
Table of Contents
The Complete Maisky Diaries: Volume 1
  • 27 October 1937
  • 12 July
  • 18 July
  • 9 August
  • 30 October
  • 31 October
  • 1 November
  • 4 November
  • 5 November
  • 6 November
  • 7 November
  • 9 November
  • 10 November
  • 12 November
  • 15 November
  • 16 November
  • 17 November
  • 18 November
  • 23 November
  • 24 November
  • 25 November
  • 27 November
  • 28 November
  • 29 November
  • 1 December
  • 5 December
  • 6 December
  • 11 December
  • 13 December
  • 16 December
  • 17 December
  • 18 December
  • 19 December
  • 20 December
  • 24 December
  • 27 December
  • 31 December
  • 8 January
  • 9 January
  • 15 January
  • 18 January
  • 25 January
  • 26 January
  • 28 January
  • 1 February
  • 4 February
  • 6 February
  • 10 February
  • 12 February
  • 14 February
  • 15 February
  • 20 February
  • 21 February
  • 22 February
  • 28 February
  • 1 March (1)
  • 1 March (2)
  • 2 March
  • 4 March
  • 5 March
  • 6 March
  • 7 March
  • 8 March
  • 9 March
  • 11 March
  • 12 March
  • 13 March
  • 14 March
  • 15 March
  • 16 March
  • 17 March
  • 18 March
  • 19 March
  • 20 March
  • 21 March
  • 22 March
  • 23 March
  • 3 June
  • 5 June
  • 6 June
  • 12 June
  • 15 June
  • 16 June
  • 17 June
  • 19 June
  • 27 June
  • 2 July
  • 8 July
  • 9 July
  • 7 September
  • 4 November
  • 6 November
  • 8 November
  • 13 November
  • 14 November
  • 15 November
  • 14 December
  • 16 December
  • 20 January
  • 21 January
  • 26 January
  • 28 January
  • 29 January
  • 30 January
  • 31 January
  • 10 February
  • 8 March
  • 9 March
  • 10 March
  • 28 March
  • 2 April
  • 3 April
  • 8 April
  • 3 May
  • 7 May
  • 10 May
  • 22 May
  • 26 May
  • 28 May
  • 12 July
  • 1 December
  • 10 January
  • 16 January
  • 17 February
  • 12 March
  • 10 April
  • 16 April
  • 17 April
  • 18 April
  • 21 April
  • 24 May
  • 9 June
  • 15 June
  • 16 June
  • 28 June
  • 1 July
  • 27 July
  • 29 July
  • 29 July
  • 1 August
  • 10 August
  • 23 August
  • 25 August
  • 12 September
  • 14 September
  • 19 September
  • 27 October
  • 6 November
  • 16 November
  • 17 November
  • 18 November
  • 24 November
  • 1 December
  • 4 December
  • 12 December
  • 14 December
  • 4 January
  • 15 January
  • 20 January
  • 25 January
  • 27 January
  • 28 January
  • 7 February
  • 11 February
  • 25 February
  • 1 March
  • 8 March
  • 11 March
  • 22 March
  • 23 March
  • 29 March
  • 31 March
  • 12 April
  • 14 April
  • 10 May
  • 4 August
  • 6 August
  • 7 August
  • 10 August
  • 11 August
  • 15 August
  • 16 August
  • 17 August
  • 20 August
  • 24 August
  • 26 August
  • 27 August
  • 28 August
  • 29 August
  • 30 August
  • 31 August
  • 1 September
  • 2 September
  • 3 September
  • 4 September
  • 5 September
  • 7 September
  • 8 September
  • 11 September
  • PS 1 October
  • 12 September
  • 13 September
  • 14 September
  • 15 September
  • 16 September
  • 18 September
  • 19 September
  • 20 September
  • 21 September
  • 22 September
  • 23 September
  • 24 September
  • 25 September
  • 26 September
  • 27 September
  • 28 September
  • 29 September
  • 30 September
  • 1 October
  • 6 October
  • 11 October
  • 13 October
  • 15 October
  • 17 October
  • 19 October
  • 20 October
  • 22 October
  • 25 October
  • 26 October
  • 27 October
  • 28 October
  • 30 October
  • 31 October
  • 1 November
  • 3 November
  • 9 November
  • 15 November
  • 16 November
  • 17 November
  • 25 November
  • 27 November
  • 7 December
  • 11 December
  • 13 December
  • 18 December
  • 19 December
< Previous document Next document >
© 2025
8 April
    • Export Citation
    • Export Annotation
View:

By Liakhovetsky, Ivan Mikhailovich (Maisky)

The Complete Maisky Diaries: Volume 1

Image view
  • Print
  • Save
  • Share
  • Cite
Translation Transcription
Translation
/ 5
  • Translation
  • Transcription
  • Print
  • Save
  • Share
  • Cite


Page 166

8 April
Agniya and I lunched at the Vansittarts. I thought I would have an open talk with V. about the current situation, but he seemed to want to avoid this: for some reason, he had also invited MacDonald and Ishbel MacDonald, who chatted away pointlessly at table and immediately slipped away after lunch. Then I exchanged a few words with the host.
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?’
***
We are leaving for France tomorrow for ten days: Easter. Time to blow away the cobwebs.
[An article in the official Journal de Moscou (which, Maisky impressed on Churchill – ‘entirely entre nous’ – was written by Litvinov and faithfully represented the Soviet point of view)
Churchill papers, CHAR 20/253/134, 24 April 1936.
stirred Maisky to prod Litvinov into action. In the article, Litvinov had reluctantly yielded to the Kremlin that belligerence towards Germany was undesirable, and had called for a special meeting of the League of Nations to establish the necessary conditions for talks with Hitler. In a strictly personal letter to Litvinov on 24 April, Maisky, most likely inspired by what he had heard in Paris from Potemkin, whose ears were well attuned to the sounds emanating from the Politburo,
Kollontay, Diplomaticheskie dnevniki, II, pp. 356–7.
urged Litvinov to take the lead in a European conciliation, redressing what he recognized to be Germany’s justified grievances:
Dear Maksim Maksimovich, I am writing to you in an entirely personal capacity and wish to share with you a few ideas which have popped up in my mind as a result of my daily encounters with the British public, especially in Labourite and Liberal circles. The issue at hand is how we should react, and what position we should take, faced with Hitler’s ‘peace plan’.


Page 167

Over the course of the last 2–3 years, our general attitude in questions of European politics has, for the most part, been to support the status quo … If we do not wish to severely weaken our authority and our influence among the democratic elements of Europe, then we should, alongside offering the severest possible criticism of Hitler’s method of foreign policy, promote … our own ‘peace plan’, under the auspices of which we can begin the mobilization of the democratic and pacifist elements of the east and the west.
The thoughts of Labourites, Liberals and Conservatives, who have an interest in maintaining the system of collective security … move along the following lines: … the current status quo is in many respects incomplete: it is coming apart at the seams and cannot hold together for much longer. Can we truly count on keeping Austria permanently from reunification (in one form or another) with Germany? Can we truly count on keeping Germany permanently from reunification with the German parts of Czechoslovakia, or Memel land, or Danzig? Isn’t such a reunification of Germans with Germans in the very nature of things? Can we really be sure that a state of the size and structure of Germany will be able to survive for very long without raw materials from its colonies? Don’t you think the time has now come for us to put forward our own ‘peace plan’? … I do not want at present to go into the details about any possible USSR ‘peace plan’. I will just make one or two brief remarks. First, it seems to me that this plan should be of a more practical nature than Hitler’s plan … Secondly, it should include not only regional pacts, but also some sort of pan-European mutual aid pact: it is only in this way that it will be possible to manoeuvre England into providing security for Eastern Europe… . The most difficult element in the creation of such a plan, of course, will be the avoidance of any harmful pressure on French or Czechoslovak interests. But I think that, within the conditions I have laid out, such a task will not be impossible. These are the considerations which I thought it my duty to put down. Decide for yourself whether they can be realized. Only one thing is clear to me, that without some positive programme in place to resolve the European situation it will be very difficult for us to retain and strengthen our influence in England.
RAN f.1702 op.4 d.143 ll.51–4.
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.


Page 168

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,


Page 421

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


Page 169

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’.
]
Transcription
/ 0
  • Translation
  • Transcription
  • Print
  • Save
  • Share
  • Cite
           
Document Details
Document Title8 April
AuthorLiakhovetsky, Ivan Mikhailovich (Maisky)
RecipientN/A
RepositoryN/A
ID #N/A
DescriptionN/A
Date1936 Apr 8
AOC VolumeThe Complete Maisky Diaries: Volume 1
Tags
Annotations
Bookmarks

  • Yale
  • Terms & Conditions
    |
  • Privacy Policy & Data Protection
    |
  • Contact
    |
  • Accesssibility
    |
  • Copyright 2018 Yale University
  • Connect with us:
  • Yale
  • Yale