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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
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  • 12 June
  • 15 June
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  • 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
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  • 20 January
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  • 26 January
  • 28 January
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  • 30 January
  • 31 January
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  • 1 December
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  • 16 January
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  • 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
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  • 25 January
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  • 28 January
  • 7 February
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  • 1 March
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  • 31 August
  • 1 September
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  • 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
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  • 11 December
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© 2025
14 September
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By Liakhovetsky, Ivan Mikhailovich (Maisky)

The Complete Maisky Diaries: Volume 1

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14 September
The day was spent in boring committees. I sat, kept silent and listened. M.M. thinks there is no sense for us to be active at the moment in these committees, except perhaps one or two. There was no Assembly today. We spent the evening in the Lignon Castle. M.M., Surits, Shtein and E.N. played bridge, while I interviewed the sous-secretaire on various issues surrounding the League of Nations.
Late in the evening K[agan] telephoned from London with the latest sensation: it has been decided at today’s Cabinet meeting that Chamberlain will fly out tomorrow for a meeting with Hitler in Berchtesgaden.
‘I fear,’ Lloyd George warned Maisky from London, ‘that the Czechs are being betrayed by Neville and Daladier’; Lloyd George papers, LG/G/14/1/5, 14 Sept. 1938.
Incredible! The leader of the British Empire goes to Canossa cap in hand to the German ‘Führer’. This is how low the British bourgeoisie have fallen!


Page 329

[Butler, whose support for appeasement and the Munich Agreement exceeded even that of Chamberlain, was the first to insist in his memoirs that he ‘was left in no doubt that the Russians did not mean business’ and that ‘Litvinov had been deliberately evasive and vague’.
Butler, The Art of the Possible, pp. 70–1 elicited a furious response from Maisky in The Times, 8 June 1971. For a tarnishing revision of Butler’s image as a respected elder statesman, see P. Stafford, ‘Political autobiography and the art of the possible: R.A. Butler at the Foreign Office, 1938–1939’, The Historical Journal, 28/4 (1985).
However, the diary and corroborative material sustain the argument that Stalin’s caution and Litvinov’s vague public statements reflected a Soviet dilemma. Any public statement might be provocative towards Germany and have unimagined repercussions if the Anglo-German negotiations did indeed reach a positive conclusion, as was anticipated. While unilateral assistance was therefore not on the cards, the Soviet Union’s commitment to its contractual obligations, provided the French first fulfilled their obligation, remained unshaken. Such an outlook, a precursor to the following year’s negotiations on a triple alliance, drew on the lasting and clear lesson of the failure to turn the 1934 agreement with France into a full-blown military alliance and the dismal experience of acting alone in Spain while appeasement of Germany was in full swing. It was one thing fighting the Germans and Italians on the edges of Europe, but quite another having to face Germany alone on the Soviet border, with an insouciant Western Europe looking on. What Litvinov vainly sought in Geneva, therefore, was the inception of military talks in London and Paris (which might have deterred Hitler), rather than negotiations with Beneš at the Castle in Prague.
Steiner, ‘Soviet Commissariat’, has done admirable work, reconstructing brick by brick the Soviet policy, unearthing many hitherto unknown documents. Her verdict that ‘it is hard to believe that an offer of unilateral Soviet support, even if it had been made, would have changed the outcome of the Czech deliberations’ can be confidently accepted. She is equally right to refute retrospective Soviet claims (as well as Maisky’s own) that the Soviet Union would have considered rendering unilateral support to Czechoslovakia. Her narrative is only marred by an uncritical adaptation of Igor Lukes’s claims that the Soviet demise in Munich led the country’s leaders back ‘to their revolutionary roots’ (pp. 755, 759, 762). In his otherwise engaging work, Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: The diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s (Oxford, 1996), as well as in ‘Stalin and Czechoslovakia in 1938–39: An autopsy of a myth’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 10/2–3 (1999), p. 38, Lukes developed a fanciful theory that Stalin expected Hitler’s offensive to be ‘but a prelude to a wave of socialist revolutions in Europe’. Such ideas have been effectively refuted by Ragsdale in The Soviets and in his ‘Soviet military preparations and policy in the Munich Crisis: New evidence’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 47/2 (1999).
The session of the morally bankrupt League, which practically ignored the Czech crisis, coincided with Chamberlain’s negotiations with Hitler leading to the Munich Conference. It turned out to be Litvinov’s swan song. The British delegation was reduced to De Le Warr, the lord privy seal, and Richard Butler, then holding a junior position at the Foreign Office. Halifax preferred to remain in London, where the real drama was unfolding. The French delegation was likewise low key. Bonnet made a brief appearance on 11 September, but his meeting with Litvinov lasted only ‘for a moment and did not go beyond generalities’.
Maisky’s account of events is in Amery papers, diary, AMEL 7/33, 15 Feb. 1939. See also P. Beck, ‘Searching for peace in Munich, not Geneva: The British government, the League of Nations, and the Sudetenland question’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 10/2–3 (1999); D. Dunn, ‘Maksim Litvinov: Commissar of contradiction’, Journal of Contemporary History, 23/2 (1988), pp. 239–40; and P. Stegnii and V. Sokolov, ‘Eyewitness testimony (Ivan Maiskii on the origins of World War II)’, International Affairs, 154 (1999). J. Hochman’s misleading The Soviet Union and the Failure of Collective Security, 1934–1938 (Ithaca, NY, 1984), pp. 156–60, exculpates the French in a highly distorted account of the handling of the negotiations by Payart and Bonnet.
Kollontay, who happened to be on the same train to Geneva as Bonnet, was startled by the melancholic mood surrounding him. The following morning she bumped into Litvinov as he emerged from his meeting with Bonnet, ‘waving his hand impatiently and with obvious irritation: “Results? None … The French don’t intend to fulfil their obligations to Czechoslovakia. When it comes to our Soviet proposal, Bonnet dodges and prevaricates, claiming he needs to consult London first. A delaying tactic, in other words. And right now every hour counts.”’
Kollontay, Diplomaticheskie dnevniki, II, pp. 396–8. A most convincing examination of the French attempts to shift responsibility onto the Russians is in M. Thomas, ‘France and the Czechoslovak Crisis’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 10/2–3 (1999).
The French were visibly surprised and embarrassed by the unexpectedly ‘firm position’ of the Soviet Union. They played down the significance of the shift, mounting a rather successful disinformation campaign (which has subsequently misled many historians). The British dominions, for instance, were convinced that the Soviet commitment was a mere feint and was aimed at impressing the League, ensnaring the West and, above all, at benefiting from a capitalist war.


Page 438

M.G. Fry, ‘Agents and structures: The dominions and the Czechoslovak Crisis, September 1938’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 10/2–3 (1999), p. 301; Carley, 1939, pp. 61–2.
Litvinov could only give vent to his frustration in a fierce speech to the Assembly that criticized Anglo-French attempts to water down the Covenant of the League and make collective action voluntary. While reiterating the Soviet proposals made to Payart, Bonnet and Beneš and reasserting Soviet loyalty to the League, Litvinov ended with an ominous warning that Anglo-French ‘capitulation’ was bound to have ‘incalculable and disastrous consequences’.
Text of the speech provided by Maisky to Noel-Baker, in the Noel-Baker papers, NBKR 4/639. Litvinov was overheard telling Negrín that ‘If we do not have a world war, you are damned’; R. Rhodes (ed.), Chips, the Diaries of Sir Henry Channon (London, 1967), p. 165.
Maisky complained to Lloyd George that throughout the crisis the British steered clear of the Russians in both London and Moscow, whereas the meetings in Geneva were confined to an ‘exchange of the latest bits of news’ and the British delegation


Page 330

‘particularly stressed … the informal character of the conversations’. Litvinov himself, as Boothby observed in Geneva, had ‘burst into bitter complaint’ about the lack of consultations when the two met.
Lloyd George papers, LG/G/14/1/9, 4 Oct. 1938, Maisky to Lloyd George; Aster, ‘Ivan Maisky and parliamentary anti-appeasement’, pp. 330–1. See also Maisky’s account of the meeting in Bilainkin, Maisky, p. 254.
At the meeting with the British delegation on 23 September, Litvinov ‘reiterated the firm resolve of the Soviet government to fulfil all her obligations under the Soviet–Czech Pact … and in turn suggested certain measures which in his opinion it would be necessary to take forthwith’. However, his demand for an emergency meeting of the powers involved, either in Paris or London, to coordinate military plans against the backdrop of the collapse of the Godesberg talks, was dismissed out of hand by the Foreign Office as being ‘of little use’, since it was bound to ‘certainly provoke Germany’. The meeting, indeed, ended with an ominous British reservation that the questions raised related only ‘to the unhappy eventualities that might occur’ if the deadlock in the negotiations with Hitler at Godesberg was not resolved.
TNA FO 371 21777 C10585/5302/18, record of the Geneva meeting and minutes, 24 Sep. 1938. For an excellent (though somewhat overlooked) survey of the military measures taken by the Russians in anticipation of war, see G. Jukes, ‘The Red Army and the Munich Crisis’, Journal of Contemporary History, 26/2 (1991).
]
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Document Details
Document Title14 September
AuthorLiakhovetsky, Ivan Mikhailovich (Maisky)
RecipientN/A
RepositoryN/A
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DescriptionN/A
Date1938 Sep 14
AOC VolumeThe Complete Maisky Diaries: Volume 1
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