After two speeches made by George VI and Leopold, who proclaimed unbreakable friendship between their states, the guests moved to the adjacent halls and we, the ambassadors, were gathered in the so-called Bow Room, where the two kings, ministers, and some high-ranking courtiers were located. The ladies were in a neighbouring hall with the young queen and the old queen mother. Here, once again, everything was as it always is at ‘state banquets’: first the kings talked between themselves while the ambassadors propped up the walls like expensive ‘diplomatic furniture’. Then Lord Cromer and other courtiers began buzzing among the guests and leading the ‘lucky few’, who were to be favoured with the ‘very highest attention’, to one or other of the kings. Leopold conversed with Chamberlain, Hoare, Montagu Norman (governor of the Bank of England) and, from among the ambassadors, with Grandi, Ribbentrop and Corbin. There was an obvious orientation towards the ‘aggressor’ and the aggressor’s collaborator.

Naturally enough, I was not so honoured: the USSR is out of fashion today, especially in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party. The Japanese ambassador Yoshida, who skulked in a corner, was not invited to pay his respects either. No wonder: Japanese guns are currently firing on British capital and British prestige in China!…

I eventually tired of this dull spectacle and I was already planning to slip out to the other rooms, where I could see many interesting people I knew. But at that moment there was a sudden commotion in the Bow Room. I looked up and realized what was happening. Lord Cromer, emerging from a neighbouring room, led Churchill to Leopold and introduced him. George soon joined them. The three of them carried on a lively and lengthy conversation, in which Churchill gesticulated forcefully and the kings laughed out loud. Then the audience ended. Churchill moved away from the kings and bumped into Ribbentrop. Ribbentrop struck up conversation with the famous ‘German-eater’. A group immediately formed around them. I did not hear what they were talking about, but I could see from a distance that Ribbentrop was, as usual, gloomily pontificating about something and that Churchill was joking in reply, eliciting bursts of laughter from the people standing around. Finally Churchill seemed to get bored, turned around and saw me. Then the following happened: in full view of the gathering and in the presence of the two kings, Churchill crossed the hall, came up to me and shook me firmly by the hand. Then we entered into an animated and extended conversation, in the middle of which King George walked up to us and made a comment to Churchill. The impression was created that George, troubled by Churchill’s inexplicable proximity to the ‘Bolshevik ambassador’, had decided to rescue him from the ‘Moscow devil’. I stepped aside and waited to see what would happen next. Churchill finished his conversation with George and returned to me to continue our interrupted conversation. The gilded aristocrats around us were well-nigh shocked.

What did Churchill have to say?

Churchill told me straight away that he considers the ‘anti-communist pact’ to be directed against the British Empire in the first place and against the USSR only in the second. He attaches a great deal of importance to this agreement between the aggressors, not so much for the present as for the future. Germany is the chief enemy. ‘The main task for all of us who defend the cause of peace,’ Churchill continued, ‘is to stick together. Otherwise we are ruined. A weak Russia presents the greatest danger for the cause of peace and for the inviolability of our Empire. We need a strong, very strong Russia.’ At this point, speaking in a low voice and as if in secret, Churchill began asking me: what was happening in the USSR? Hadn’t the most recent events weakened our army? Hadn’t they shaken our ability to withstand pressure from Japan and Germany?

‘May I reply with a question?’ I began, and continued: ‘If a disloyal general commanding a corps or an army is replaced by an honest and reliable general, is this the weakening or the strengthening of an army? If a director of a big gun factory, engaged in sabotage, is replaced by an honest and reliable director, is this the weakening or the strengthening of our military industry?’ I continued in this vein, dismantling the old wives’ tales which are currently so popular here about the effect of the ‘purge’ on the general condition of the USSR.

Churchill listened to me with the greatest attention, although he shook his head distrustfully every now and again. When I had finished, he said: ‘It is very comforting to hear all this. If Russia is growing stronger, not weaker, then all is well. I repeat: we all need a strong Russia; we need it very much!’ Then, after a moment’s pause, Churchill added: ‘That Trotsky, he is a perfect devil. He is a destructive, and not a creative force. I’m wholly for Stalin.’

In a less glaring report to Narkomindel, clearly aimed at bolstering his continued indispensable presence in Britain against the backdrop of the purges at the ministry, Maisky emphasized the demonstration of Churchill’s ‘friendly feelings towards me’, as well as the latter’s acknowledgement that ‘above all we now need a strong Russia’; DVP, 1937, XX, doc. 411.

I asked Churchill what he thought about Halifax’s forthcoming visit to Berlin.

Halifax accepted an invitation to Germany in his capacity as the ‘Master of the Middleton Hunt’ to attend an international hunting exhibition in Berlin, in the course of which he had a lengthy talk with Hitler. Maisky gleaned from Lloyd George, on 21 November, that the reconciliation with Germany had become Chamberlain’s main goal, even if it meant sacrificing Spain, Austria and Czechoslovakia and was pursued against Eden’s specific will. Eden’s popularity, however, prevented Chamberlain from removing him from office, as he was bound to become the nucleus of a powerful opposition; DVP, 1937, XX, docs. 415 & 420. See also Ragsdale, The Soviets, pp. 3–4.

Churchill pulled a wry face and said that he regarded the trip as a mistake. Nothing will come of it; the Germans will only turn up their noses even more and treat the visit as a sign of England’s weakness. This is no use either to England or to the cause of peace. But at least Halifax is an honest man and will not succumb to any ‘disgraceful’ schemes, such as betraying Czechoslovakia or giving Germany a free hand in the east. All the same, they should never have bothered with this visit!

Churchill shook my hand and proposed that we should meet more often.

[The three waves of purges at Narkomindel commenced at the end of 1937, gathered momentum after the Munich Conference, and peaked with the dismissal of Litvinov in early May 1939 and the subsequent cleansing of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. The deployment of terror by the state was aimed at instilling fear in the population and enforcing obedience through violence. Historians are still deeply divided over the motives for the terror. It may have been inspired by the ideological predisposition of a ‘utopia in power’, marking a continuity of the Leninist and Stalinist perceptions of terror as a useful tool of control; it could have been a spontaneous reaction to changing historical circumstances, which naturally brought Stalin’s personality to the fore as instigator and pursuer; or, widening the scope further, it might be ascribed to fear among the leadership about their continuing survival and domination.

The constant factor in the emergence of the terror, as the Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk has convincingly shown, was the Stalinist fear of the formation of a ‘Fifth Column’ in the likely event of war sparked by the rise of Nazism. The intensification of the terror coincided with growing international tension and threat of war, and was amplified by the experiences of the Spanish Civil War. The lessons drawn from that war were that the social upheaval caused by war could breed treachery at home, which had to be nipped in the bud.

Within the sphere of foreign policy, the terror highlighted the long-standing conflict between Stalin’s Politburo and the elite of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, which was by no means a cohesive monolith blindly following Stalin’s diktat. Naturally it aroused his ‘suspicion of his comrades-in-arms who could recall the heyday of party democracy’.

Forcefully argued by O. Khlevniuk, ‘The reasons for the “Great Terror”: The foreign-political aspect’, in S. Pons and A. Romano (eds), Russia in the Age of Wars, 1914–1945 (Milan, 2000), and by G. Roberts, ‘The fascist war threat and Soviet politics in the 1930s’, in the same edited volume.

Stalin was determined to break up the old cliques and, above all, to stamp out the prevailing dual allegiances – to him and to patrons in the various party and state institutions. The Commissariat for Foreign Affairs was especially vulnerable, as the recruitment of key personnel was conducted personally by Chicherin and Litvinov from a cosmopolitan, polyglot and independent-minded retinue, in many cases members of the revolutionary intelligentsia from the tsarist days. Cosmopolitanism in particular implied contamination through direct contact with the seductive bourgeois environment. The old cadres were to be replaced by a new generation of leaders, devoid of an ‘inflated sense of their own worth, due to revolutionary service’, who owed their promotion to Stalin personally.

The terror affected Soviet foreign policy at two levels. First of all, the old guard at the Commissariat was almost completely wiped out: at least 62 per cent of top-level diplomats and officials were eliminated by the ezhovshchina, while only 16 per cent remained in post; Narkomindel was infiltrated by NKVD officials. The all-consuming purge and basic survival instincts set diplomats against each other both secretly and publicly. Second, and just as significant, was the ravaging image of the terror abroad. This had direct repercussions on Western foreign policy. Surprisingly few diplomats defected, and not necessarily the most prominent ones.

T. Uldricks, ‘The impact of the Great Purges on the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs’, Slavic Review, 6/2 (1977); S. Dullin, ‘L’Union soviétique et la France à un tournant: conjoncture extérieure et évolution interne en 1936–1937’, Matériaux pour l’Histoire de Notre Temps, 65-6 (2002).

Certain precursors to the terror exposed Stalin’s personal intervention. In July 1936, he reproached Karakhan,

Lev Mikhailovich Karakhan, deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs in 1918–20 and 1927–34, he was later ambassador to Poland, China and Turkey.

the ambassador in Turkey, whose recall, arrest and execution in December 1937 heralded the cleansing in Narkomindel: ‘Your treatment of, and demands from, the Turks create a bad impression. Never allow nerves to interfere with politics. Hold yourself calm and maintain dignity.’

RGASPI, Stalin papers, f.558 op.11 d.214 l.24.

Far more alarming was the execution of Litvinov’s deputy, Krestinsky,

Nikolai Nikolaevich Krestinsky, deputy commissar for foreign affairs, 1930–37. Shot in 1938; rehabilitated posthumously.

who was replaced by Potemkin, a cunning and ambitious diplomat. In her diary, Kollontay describes how, while ‘wriggly, adulatory’ in Litvinov’s presence, out of his superior’s sight Potemkin left no one in any doubt that he could be at least as good a commissar for foreign affairs. He associated Litvinov, of whom he was contemptuous, with the ‘old underground workers’. In Litvinov, he told Kollontay:

Potemkin’s appointment as deputy commissar for foreign affairs undermined the position of both Litvinov and Maisky. He now spread the word that Litvinov was getting ready to retire.

See Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security, p. 132.

Potemkin, as Kollontay found out while on a stroll with him and Litvinov on the shores of Lake Geneva, was not only a proponent of keeping the German door wide open, but was also subservient to the Kremlin:

‘The past winter and the current summer,’ Maisky lamented to his brother, ‘have been very agitated in the sphere of international affairs, and this has significantly affected my health. What is more, I have been on average 50% busier this year than before … With time this has had a significant effect on my nerves, my attention, and – taken together – my day-to-day work.’

RAN f.1702 op.4 d.152 l.50, 27 Aug. 1937.

One can only imagine how Maisky felt when Aleksandr Barmin,

Aleksandr Barmin, a former military intelligence officer, he served as chargé d’affaires at the Soviet embassy in Athens, 1935–37.

one of the few defectors from the Soviet diplomatic service, wrote a long article in the New York Times, describing not only the pitiful situation of Litvinov, but also that of the three survivors Surits, Troyanovsky and Maisky, the last mentioned had fought the Bolsheviks in the Civil War together with the White Russian Admiral Kolchak.

New York Times, 25 December 1937.

Maisky’s oblique reference above to the trying situation is typical of the mood of subdued depression which had enveloped the Soviet diplomatic corps throughout Europe as the wave of repressions started to lap at Narkomindel’s door.

On the wide scope and extent of the purges in the ministry, see Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security, pp. 148–50.

Earlier on, Beatrice Webb, though still an admirer of the great social changes in the Soviet Union, was nonetheless concerned about ‘the big blot on the picture, the terror, suspicions, suppression of free opinion, the arrests, prosecutions, death penalties … Those amazing confessions which would not be considered as evidence in an English Court, how are they obtained?’ She was particularly worried (as undoubtedly was Maisky) by the fact that his predecessor Sokolnikov was ‘still in prison, apparently [he has] not yet confessed’.

Webb, diary, 25 Nov. 1936, p. 6265.

Circumspection had clearly become the order of the day, as is well illustrated by the paucity of entries in Maisky’s diary for the second half of 1937. An indiscreet comment or an emotional outburst could be fatal for a diplomat in the event that he or she was indicted; yet the need for self-expression and empathy was nigh irresistible. The solution often came in the form of seemingly innocuous hints and innuendos, even allegories, that were tacitly understood by the correspondents but were hardly incriminating. Kollontay, for instance, concluded a brief note to Maisky with her fondest greetings and a cryptic, but well-understood, comment on how precious were ‘genuine sympathy and feelings of friendship in life which made them so much dearer’.

RAN f.1702 op.4 d.509 ll.31–2.

A love letter written by Maisky to Agniya on their wedding anniversary is drenched in allusions to the fragility of the future and the need to celebrate the fleeting moment – and above all the past. It is prefaced by two lines from Nikolai Nekrasov’s portentous poem ‘A New Year’:

Freda Utley, an ardent communist and intimate friend of the Maiskys, whose Russian husband had been arrested and was eventually shot, remembered coming to plead with Maisky. Noticing a Mongolian ring on her finger, he ‘quoted the Chinese saying: “Everything passes”’.

Page 427

Utley, Odyssey of a Liberal, p. 125. Lord Inman recalled in the Lords that Maisky used to have on his desk a large card bearing the words ‘This also will pass’; Hansard, HL Deb 16 April 1946, vol. 140, col. 830.

No wonder, therefore, that when the time arrived for his summer vacation, Maisky was determined to avoid Moscow on his way to the sanatorium. He intended to explore the remote corners of the country, on the rather flimsy pretext that this would better acquaint him with ‘the achievements of socialist construction’ and would be ‘extremely useful’ in countering anti-Soviet propaganda in England.

Quoted from Myasnikov, Maiskii: Izbrannaya perepiska, II, pp. 56–7.

Litvinov, too, was cracking under the pressure: he relished the cure he took in Czechoslovakia, and even more so the five days he could spare before the Assembly met, when he toured Austria and Switzerland and tried to avoid thinking about the gathering clouds on the international scene ‘and other unpleasant things’.

Litvinov now protected his ambassadors by conferring with them in Geneva rather than in Moscow. Maisky, who a year earlier had been discouraged from attending the Assembly,

See commentary following the diary entry for 12 July 1936.

was now welcomed, and at the same time was instructed to defer his holiday in Russia and remain at his post.

RAN f.1702 op.4 d.546 l.41–2, Litvinov to Maisky, 8 Sep. 1937.

Two prominent members of the Soviet delegation in London, the military attaché Putna and Ozersky, the head of the trade delegation, were recalled and executed, while the able first secretary Kagan, who had worked with the discredited Sokolnikov, was recalled to Moscow, like so many other experienced diplomats – ostensibly to prevent them from ‘being too acclimatized to particular countries’.

Webb, diary, 27 Oct. 1937, p. 6393.

Rumours were rife in the London press about Maisky’s own imminent withdrawal.

Bilainkin, Maisky, pp. 160–1.

Kollontay’s diary captures the depressing and terrorizing impact of the purges, only alluded to in Maisky’s diary and letters. She describes how, like Litvinov, she was relieved by the ‘holiday mood’ over breakfast at the restaurant in the Palais de Nations ‘from which there is a long view out to the Alps’. She tried desperately ‘not to think about the troubling news from Moscow which Surits had shared with me that morning’. On her way back to Stockholm the following day, she could be found dejectedly sipping her coffee at the railway station in Basel and avoiding the newspapers, which contained rumours of her recall and even of her defection. She was consumed with thoughts about the vicissitudes of life that had overwhelmed her friend David Kandelaki.

David Vladimirovich Kandelaki, trade representative at the Soviet embassy in Berlin, 1934–37. Recipient of the Order of Lenin in 1937, shortly after which he was arrested; condemned to death in July 1938; rehabilitated posthumously.

Only recently he had been engaged in clandestine negotiations in Berlin on Stalin’s behalf; now he had been withdrawn from the German capital, sacked from Narkomindel and arrested.

With hindsight, it is mind-boggling that despite the misery and pain, Maisky and Kollontay, having thrown their lot in with the Bolsheviks, accepted the purges as an inevitable and necessary purification, justified by the revolutionary process and the subversion by Russia’s enemies. And yet, by 1937 they had obviously modified their views. ‘All the plots and intrigues of the papal court in old Rome,’ Kollontay entered in her diary, ‘all the perfidy and hypocrisy of the Medici courts, with their poisoned gloves and daggers in the back, pale before their maleficence and perfidy. The work of the Jesuits at the courts of absolute monarchs in Renaissance Europe seems child’s play. Hypocrisy and perfidy are flourishing, schemes and conspiracies are afoot’; Kollontay, Diplomaticheskie dnevniki, II, pp. 389 & 391, 29 & 30 Sep. 1937.

It was hard enough to pursue level-headed policy at the time of the purges; but just as testing for Maisky were the constant demands from friends and foes alike to come up with explanations for them. He would, Beatrice Webb noted, be ‘reserved about the arrests and rumours of arrests; justifies some, denies the fact of others’. Meanwhile Agniya, whose brother-in-law had just been arrested and sent to a gulag,

Interview with Alexei Voskressenski, Maisky’s great-nephew.

was ‘tired and I think, depressed’. Beatrice Webb was seriously concerned ‘whether he will last long as ambassador in England’. ‘The sickening vilification of all who differ from the policy of the governing clique,’ she moaned in her diary, ‘the perpetual fear of innocent citizens of being wrongly accused and convicted is a terrible social disease. It must need strong nerves to be a Soviet diplomat even in a democratic country … Any intercourse with the rulers of the country, or even with any citizen might be interpreted as incipient treachery to their own government. The poor Maiskys, what a life they must be leading!’

Webb, diary, 5 July 1937, pp. 6358–92 & 6431, 23 Jan. & 8 March 1938; MacKenzie and MacKenzie, Diary of Beatrice Webb, IV, pp. 398–9, 12 December 1937.

No wonder Agniya suffered a nervous breakdown, from which she emerged only at the beginning of 1938.

When Dalton met Maisky at his office in the embassy to inquire about the purges, he had a strong feeling that ‘there was an unseen listener to our conversation’. Maisky defended the execution of the generals, particularly of Tukhachevsky, and of Putna, arguing that they were

In a conversation with Dalton, Vansittart, clearly echoing Maisky, appeared to be ‘very sceptical about the earlier blood baths, but he was satisfied that the Generals were guilty; that they had been in close relations with Germany and were planning a military dictatorship and the elimination of Stalin and Voroshilov’. Tukhachevsky, Maisky told Beatrice Webb, wanted ‘to be the Napoleon of the Russian Revolution’ (emphasis in original). Putna, Maisky’s former military attaché, was ‘a fellow conspirator’. They could not be trusted if Germany were to attack Russia and ‘had to be liquidated’.

Webb, diary, 25 July 1937, pp. 6358–9. In his old age, Maisky would cover his tracks, hailing both men, see ‘V Londone’ in Ya.I. Koritskii, S.M. Melnik-Tukhachevskaya and B.N. Chistov (eds), Marshal Tukhachevskii: vospominaniya druzei i soratnikov (Moscow, 1965). The left remained divided. Maisky’s friend, the renowned publisher Gollancz, for instance, did not hesitate to propose Stalin – who, he believed, was ‘safely guiding Russia on the road to a society in which there will be no exploitation’ – as the man of the year for a British news magazine; Gollancz papers, MSS 151/3/U/1/30, 3 Nov. 1937.

Like Kollontay, Maisky never repudiated the terror either privately or publicly. He shared with her, as did many of their revolutionary generation, the pain brought about by the ‘widely prevalent … brutality, intolerance, injustice and the suffering of human beings’, but, like her, he regarded the terror in a determinist fashion, as a transitional stage that was indispensable for the radical political and economic transformation which the Soviet Union was undergoing.

Ada Nilsson papers, Letter to Ada Nilsson, 21 July 1938.

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