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12 July

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By Liakhovetsky, Ivan Mikhailovich (Maisky)

The Complete Maisky Diaries: Volume 1

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Page 177

12 July

At Garvin’s request I received a correspondent of the Observer who wished to collect information about Chicherin.

Georgii Vasilevich Chicherin, son of a retired diplomat, Chicherin was born into the nobility. An outstanding polymath and polyglot, he graduated from the historical-philological faculty of St Petersburg University and joined the archives department of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. A highly accomplished pianist (he eventually produced an authoritative biography of Mozart), he was deeply interested in cultural modernism, and in 1904 took leave of absence and moved to Berlin, where he joined the Menshevik section of the Russian Social Democratic Party. He spent the rest of the years until the revolution in political exile in Paris and (mostly) in London, where he befriended Maisky. Returning to Russia after the revolution, he joined the Bolsheviks and was appointed by Trotsky as his deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs and, from 1918–30, replaced him as commissar. In this capacity he was the architect of the Brest-Litovsk agreement and the Rapallo Agreement, and of the gradual accommodation with the capitalist world. His unconventional methods of work led to a fierce and open clash with his deputy, Litvinov, whom he regarded as boorish and amateurish, but who, in 1930, replaced him as people’s commissar.

The article appeared today:

ARISTOCRAT AND COMMUNIST. M. Chicherin’s CAREER. A REMARKABLE CHARACTER. (BY A CORRESPONDENT) M. George Chicherin, the Soviet Union’s former Commissar for Foreign Affairs, whose death occurred last week, was inspired early in life by the ideals of the young revolutionaries of the land-owing class in Russia, who, twenty years before, had renounced their privileges and their fortunes to serve the people, then living under the most appalling conditions. An aristocrat like them, he too renounced a fortune in order to spend it on the revolutionary movement. He carried his ideals even into his dress. He would wear the shabbiest of clothes, not because he could not afford to wear better, but because he believed it was serving the movement. He was very fond of music and played the piano brilliantly. But when he joined the revolutionary movement he said, ‘Music is a waste of time. I will indulge in it no longer.’ So he gave up his music and stopped going to concerts and the theatre.

Nonetheless, his motto for his work on Mozart’s operas was: ‘There are great ideas floating in the world but above them floats the figure of Mozart.’ This led to the suppression of the work until the 1970s.

LIFE OF MOZART. When the Russian exiles in London gave a soiree in 1915 in celebration of May Day it was only with the greatest difficulty that they could persuade him to sit down at the piano that was in the room. But when he did play he played magnificently, in spite of the fact that he had not touched the keys of a piano for years before that night. He never played again, however, until after his retirement. Then he not only took up his music once more, but he also wrote a life of his favourite composer, Mozart.

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He seldom used a typewriter and as rarely dictated his letters and reports. He preferred to write every word himself. When he was secretary of the Russian Social Democratic party, which had groups in every big city of Europe, he used to write to every group and often write several copies of his letters. Later, when he became Commissar, he still kept up this practice. Sometimes notes and documents would get buried under the disorderly piles of papers that littered every corner of his rooms, but his memory was such that he always knew exactly where he had placed them, and when others considered them lost beyond all hope of recovery he would find them in a moment. A ‘NIGHTBIRD’. He had the extraordinary habit, too, of writing long into the night. This habit so grew upon him that at last he could not work in the day, and he would even make appointments for foreign ambassadors to meet him at one or two o’clock in the morning. As there was only one ‘nightbird’ like himself, the German Ambassador at Moscow, Brockdorff-Ranzau,

Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Ranzau, a Weimar German foreign minister and member of the German delegation to Versailles, he went on to become the German ambassador in Moscow, 1922–28.

these midnight interviews were not very popular. Nor were they good for Chicherin himself. Ill-health had always greatly troubled him, and his constant work late into every night certainly accentuated it. He was extremely well educated, and spoke perfectly English, French, and German, besides his own language. He also read an immense number of books and newspapers in various languages, and he once remarked to a friend of his, ‘If you read carefully the newspapers in various languages and of various shades of opinion you can always be au courant with every diplomatic “secret.”’

[There follows a long gap in the diary at a rather crucial moment, marked by a swift deterioration in relations between the two countries and the unleashing of the political trials and terror in Moscow. The Anglo-French debacle in handling Mussolini, Maisky lamented, was leading the Soviet government to doubt ‘whether it was worthwhile binding themselves up with such half-hearted partners as the British Government’. The Foreign Office was ‘split from top to bottom … and the Cabinet did not know its mind’. With Japan, Germany and Italy ‘greedy’ for colonies, it was ‘the British Empire which was in peril – and not the USSR’, which deemed it ‘wiser … to withdraw and mind [its] own business’ even if that implied the establishment of a German ‘Mittel Europa’.

Webb, diary, 11 May 1936, pp. 6158–60.

Page 179

Almost a year later, we still find Maisky disclosing the Kremlin’s views that ‘after the experience of Spain and the shilly-shallying of the British and French governments, the USSR might virtually withdraw from any further collaboration with Western powers and devote itself to the building up of socialism and the further development of defence’.

MacKenzie and MacKenzie, Diary of Beatrice Webb, IV, 27 Feb. 1937.

And yet, despite recurring setbacks, Maisky, unlike Litvinov, remained convinced – right up until the outbreak of war – that Anglo-Soviet interests were in harmony and that gradually the British were bound to seek Soviet assistance. As early as June 1936, he approached Brailsford (whom he held in great esteem as ‘a better judge of the English character’) to inquire whether he shared his view that the current ‘drift and indecision’ was only ‘a temporary phase and that before long the force of circumstance will compel Britain to take a definite attitude’.

RAN f.1702 op.4 d.862 l.15, 3 June 1936.

For the moment, however, he obviously had to toe the Kremlin line, though he would make persistent subversive attempts to prepare the ground for an approach by Britain.

The swift turn of events, however, made it difficult for the Soviet Union to sit on the fence while Hitler appeared to be effectively wooing British politicians, largely by whipping up the ‘red scare’. Lloyd George, who, in his conversations with Maisky, had praised the Soviet Union as the only country to be pursuing a ‘lucid, precise, defined policy – a policy of peace’, now dismissed the ideological tenets of Hitler’s Russian policy contained in a chapter from Mein Kampf which Maisky had sent him.

DVP, 1936, XIX, doc. 208; A.J.P. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd George: A diary by Frances Stevenson (London, 1971), pp. 324–5.

Filled with admiration for the ‘Führer’, whom he had just met in Berchtesgaden, Lloyd George regretted the chill that had settled on relations with Germany following the outbreak of war in Spain, and confessed that he had ‘never withdrawn one particle of the admiration which [he] personally felt for [Hitler] … I only wish we had a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today.’

Sylvester papers, Lloyd George to Conwell Evans, A40, 18 Dec. 1937, and diary entry of 3 Sep. 1936.

On the other hand, the tentative feelers put out by the Russians in Berlin provoked a virulent response. Speaking to the party meeting in Nuremberg in mid-September, Hitler abused the Soviet Union as a country seeking ‘the liberation of the scum of humanity’. He appeared to incite the Western powers openly, as Stalin marked in his thick black pencil on the text of the speech, to take concrete action against the USSR, when he warned that ‘if the modern Girondins are succeeded by Jacobins, if Kerensky’s

Aleksandr Kerensky, prime minister in the Russian Provisional Government, July–November 1917.

Popular Front gives place to the Bolshevists, then Europe will sink into a sea of blood and mourning’. From Berlin, Surits, the Soviet ambassador, warned Stalin that Hitler was provoking Russia to sever relations between the two countries. He, like Litvinov, wished to see a tougher attitude towards Germany. Instead, Stalin opted for further futile negotiations in Berlin, prompted by the British stand over the Spanish Civil War and the fear of becoming prematurely embroiled in hostilities.

RGASPI, Stalin papers, f.558 op.11 d.214 ll.31–6; see also Dullin, Men of Influence, pp. 137–9.

It took a while for the repercussions of the horrific Spanish Civil War, which erupted on 17 July when General Francisco Franco

Francisco Franco, general, commander-in-chief, Moroccan army, 1935; chief of staff of Spanish Foreign Legion, 1935; commander-in-chief Canary Islands, 1936; commander-in-chief and head of state of Spanish Nationalist regime, 1936–39.

led a military revolt against the Spanish Popular Front government, to be fully registered in Moscow. The war undermined Litvinov’s efforts to restore the First World War coalition against Germany. Back from the Montreux Conference (which reaffirmed the 1923 Turkish Straits’ regime), he was coming under

Page 180

increasing criticism, while his personal life was in turmoil. His decision at the end of July 1936 to have Zina, a 17-year-old girl – described (by Ivy, Litvinov’s wife) as ‘nubile … decidedly vulgar, very sexy, very sexy indeed’ – accompany him ‘as his daughter’ to the sanatorium at Kislovodsk led Ivy to pack and leave for remote Sverdlovsk. There, heedless of his distraught entreaties, she remained teaching schoolchildren English for three years, until his demotion.

Ivy Litvinov’s papers, draft memoirs. Litvinov was crushed by her decision to leave. This European bohemian way of life, as Montefiore suggests in Stalin: The court of the Red Tsar, pp. 246–7, could hardly endear Litvinov to the puritanical Stalin. There is nothing to suggest, as Dullin does in Men of Influence, pp. 216–17, that Litvinov deliberately encouraged her to depart to protect her from the Stalinist carnage.

Like most men, Ivy thought, he desired a wife and a mistress. ‘I used to go about the town,’ she recalled, ‘walking about the streets, and suddenly our enormous Cadillac would dash by with Zina sitting beside the chauffeur, she’d gone out shopping … she turned up at the Foreign Office to fetch him in full riding kit.’ Coming back into town from their dacha, Litvinov ‘would have his arm round her, shrieking with laughter and giggling, tickling … people in trams gazing down’. A large part of Litvinov’s melancholy and resignation – often ascribed to the failure of collective security and the mortifying purges in his ministry – should clearly be attributed to personal aspects of his life.

Off to Kislovodsk, Litvinov encouraged Maisky to take his own summer leave, as the season had ‘begun earlier than expected’. He continued, however, to fend off Maisky’s efforts to rekindle the intimacy of their exile days and reiterated his position as primus inter pares. ‘It would be difficult,’ he responded to Maisky’s pleadings to attend the

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September assembly of the League, ‘to swap you for Potemkin or Shtein

Boris Efimovich Shtein, general secretary of the Soviet delegation at the Geneva Disarmament Conference, 1927–32; chief of the second western department in the NKID, 1932 and 1934; member of the Soviet delegation to the League of Nations, 1934–38; ambassador to Finland, 1933–34, and to Italy, 1934–39; demoted to a lecturer position at the diplomatic academy of the NKID in 1939.

for no good reason, as they have developed very good personal contacts over there.’ Maisky was never to enjoy the warmth which infused Litvinov’s relations with Kollontay. Not only was she encouraged to come to Geneva, but Litvinov would cut short tedious discussion within the delegation by turning to her: ‘But now, Aleksandra Mikhailovna, where’s that film about China showing, the one you praised? Is it worth watching? Come on then, let’s go now.’

RAN f.1702 op.4 d.546 ll.34–6, 31 July 1936; Kollontay, Diplomaticheskie dnevniki, II, pp. 356–7.

Maisky left England for the Soviet Union on 11 August, first for Sochi and then – blissfully cut off from the world – for a delightful tour of the Caucasus.

RAN f.1702 op.4 d.878 l.3, Maisky to Webb, 20 Oct. 1936; Beaverbrook papers, BBK\C\238, letter from Maisky, 9 Nov. 1936.

Harsh reality awaited him on his return to Moscow. He was urgently summoned to the Foreign Ministry, briefed about the war in Spain and rushed to a nocturnal meeting at the Kremlin, where he was instructed to return to his post right away. The following day, he found himself on a train bound for London – a journey which would take two days and three nights via Berlin and Paris.

Maisky, Spanish Notebooks, pp. 20–2. Maisky expected to spend a couple of months in Russia; see RAN f.1702 op.4 d.854 l.2, Maisky to Beaverbrook, 10 Aug. 1936.

In London, Maisky faced a grim situation which would trouble him for the next three years. During his absence, Britain and France had formed a ‘non-intervention’ committee, which the Soviet Union joined on 23 August. The scores of meetings of the committee over the next three years not only sapped his energy, but exposed even more the helplessness of Russia, which became increasingly alienated from the West.

For a candid description of the dramatis personae on the committee, see Maisky, Spanish Notebooks, ch. 7. See also G. Martel (ed.), The Times and Appeasement: The Journals of A.L. Kennedy, 1932-1939 (CUP, 2000), p. 273; and Girard de Charbonnières, La plus evitable de toutes les guerres (Paris, 1985), pp. 109–22. On the confusion surrounding Soviet policy at the outset of the conflict and its impact on Maisky, see exchanges between Kaganovich, Litvinov and Stalin, in O. Khlevniuk et al. (eds), Stalin i Kaganovich: Perepiska, 1931–1936 gg. (Moscow, 2001), especially doc. 861.

Much of this was due to Hitler’s success in wrapping the Civil War in an ideological mantle, harping on British fears that communism would spread from Spain to France, whose prime minister, the socialist Léon Blum, headed a Popular Front government. The lingering conflict only reinforced suspicion of Soviet intentions, and this suspicion was fuelled by the ongoing purges in Moscow. All this was to have disastrous consequences in the crucial years leading up to the war.

At a stroke, the war in Spain stripped Maisky of the limited success he had enjoyed in England. Eden’s concealed hostility came to the fore in their first meeting, shortly after his return from Russia. Maisky found it difficult to convince Eden that the Soviet Union was not exploiting the war in Spain to advance communism. He emphatically dismissed the ideological dimensions of the war, insisting that Soviet assistance was solely motivated by the fear that Franco’s victory might tilt the balance of power in Europe and encourage Hitler to expand further. ‘Nobody governing Russia today,’ he insisted, ‘thought that [communism] could be achieved … in our lifetime.’

Page 422

TNA FO 371 20584 W15074/9549/41, 3 Nov. 1936. A convincing dismissal of the ideological premises of the war are in Ragsdale, The Soviets, pp. 188–9.

Churchill, too, showed signs of wavering. While still committed to the idea of collective security, and recognizing the growing strength of the Soviet Union and its wish ‘to be left alone in peace’, he deplored in parliament her ‘obscure, so double-faced, so transitional’ state of affairs. ‘Russia is in very great peril,’ he concluded, ‘and it is most surprising that a State thus threatened should act with such insensate folly.’

Hansard, HC Deb 5 November 1936, vol. 317, cols 318–19. Maisky had warned Narkomindel that while Churchill still perceived an Anglo-Soviet–French combination to be the only effective means of stopping Hitler, he was ‘unhappy about the Soviet “intervention” in Spanish affairs’, which, he warned, could harm Anglo-Soviet relations; DVP, 1936, XIX, doc. 341, 1 Nov.; and Churchill papers, CHAR 2/259/81, Maisky to Churchill, 19 Oct. 1936.

Maisky was greatly disappointed to find Lloyd George reprimanding the Soviet Union in public for sending volunteers to Spain.

RAN f.1702 op.4 d.994 l.2, Maisky to Lloyd George, 8 Dec. 1936.

Page 182

Litvinov, as Carley has rightly observed, saw the Spanish Civil War as a major threat to ‘collective security’, undermining relations with Britain while cementing the ties between Italy and Germany – ties which would indeed culminate in a short while in the anti-Comintern pact. Litvinov, far less optimistic than Maisky about the possible success of the Republicans,

A most convincing argument is presented in Dullin, Men of Influence, pp. 133–5. Maisky told the Webbs that he had ‘little fear of getting involved in a war through helping the Spanish government … implying that the Kremlin was willing to run the risk in order to prevent the rise of a fascist Spain’; Webb, diary, 15 Nov. 1936, pp. 6260–1; M.J. Carley, ‘Caught in a cleft stick: Soviet diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War’, in G. Johnson (ed.), The International Context of the Spanish Civil War (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 2009).

was eager to contain the conflict and prevent it from shifting the balance of power on the continent by cooperating with the Non-Intervention Committee in London.

This committee, however, failed to prevent the Germans and Italians from directly assisting Franco. As is revealed by recently released archival material, Stalin’s decision to assist the Republicans militarily was motivated first and foremost by political and Realpolitik considerations.

Most decisively, R. Radosh, M.R. Habeck and G. Sevostianov, Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (New Haven, CT, 2001). While exposing the absence of any pure ideological drive in Spain and the rather superficial ‘anti-fascist’ cloak, the recent works fail to perceive the vital international perspective of the intervention which emerges from Maisky’s diary and the commentary.

However, increasingly he was finding himself in a harsh predicament similar to the one he had to face during the 1926 British General Strike, when even half-hearted support of the miners led to the severance of relations in 1927. The pressure now from ideologists within his party and abroad for him to intervene on behalf of the left in Spain was nigh irresistible. The revolutionary situation had not been sparked by the Russians, and soon enough ran counter to Soviet national interests. Remaining passive, however, would have rendered Stalin vulnerable at home – particularly as the Trotskyites were trying to take the lead on the Republican side. Domestic and international politics were further bound up with the unleashing of the repressions marked by the trial of the veteran Bolshevik leaders, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Therefore, in September Stalin approved the despatch of war matériel to the Spanish Republicans and reluctantly supported the idea, put forward by the French communists, of ‘international brigades’.

Alarmed at the harsh British reaction and the French threat to abrogate the mutual assistance pact, Litvinov finally succeeded in overcoming opposition from Stalin (whom he met six times in October and November) and from Maisky and arrest the Soviet attempts to maintain the military equilibrium. Not for the first time in Soviet history, when ideology and state interests collided, ‘Realpolitik’ gained the upper hand in the Kremlin.

Blum warned Litvinov that on no account would France intervene in Spain, and that Soviet intervention was jeopardizing the collaboration between the two countries. Dullin, Men of Influence, pp. 126–7.

With the fate of Madrid still very much in the balance, Litvinov informed Maisky in November that Soviet assistance would gradually cease. ‘The Spanish question has undoubtedly significantly worsened our international position,’ he explained. ‘It has spoiled our relations with England and France and sown doubt in Bucharest and even in Prague.’

Quoted in Carley, ‘Caught in a cleft stick’, p. 163. This thorough and documented work should be considered the most reliable and up-to-date account of Soviet foreign policy during the Spanish Civil War. His narrative questions the conclusions of Z. Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark, pp. 230–1, who, following in the footsteps of Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security, suggests that the diversion to the east in the wake of the outbreak of the Japanese–Chinese war in July 1937 and the logistical constraints, mostly naval weakness, were prime reasons for the detachment from Spain and the withdrawal into isolation, as advocated by Zhdanov and Potemkin.

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Document Title12 July

AuthorLiakhovetsky, Ivan Mikhailovich (Maisky)

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Date1936 Jul 12

AOC VolumeThe Complete Maisky Diaries: Volume 1

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