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1 October

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By Liakhovetsky, Ivan Mikhailovich (Maisky)

The Complete Maisky Diaries: Volume 1

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1 October

I visited Lloyd George in Churt. We had a long talk about the crisis. Among other things, Lloyd George told me an extraordinary story. A week ago, Baldwin came to Chamberlain and said: ‘You must do everything in your power to avoid a war, however humiliating the cost. Just think what will happen if it comes to war! Our complete unpreparedness will immediately become apparent and then the indignant public will have us both hanging from the street lamps.’ Lloyd George is convinced that this consideration played a major role in the capitulation in Munich.

Lloyd George sees the near future in a very bleak light. A crushing defeat has been inflicted on Western democracies in Munich. France has turned into a second-rate power (Daladier is weak, and Bonnet is a traitor). The League of Nations and collective security are dead. The world has entered the era of the mailed fist and of wild outbursts of coarse violence. England is in a deeply reactionary state. Power is in the hands of the most conservative circles of the bourgeoisie, who fear communism most of all and calculate their every step accordingly. Chamberlain’s next objective, in the sphere of foreign policy, is the

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‘Pact of the Four’, and, in domestic politics, elections, at which he will try to capitalize on his ‘success’ in Munich.

‘The sole bright spot against this dark background,’ concluded Lloyd George, ‘is the USSR. It has conducted itself with dignity during the crisis. It is the sun of world democracy today. There were times when all the democratic elements in various countries looked up to us, England and France. It is not so any longer. Now all democratic elements all over the world turn their gaze on you, the USSR.’

Lloyd George was interested in the Soviet response to the Munich Conference. I replied that I had not been fully informed as yet, but I had no doubt that the response would be sharply negative. Disappointment and irritation with Britain and France would undoubtedly grow and isolationist tendencies would intensify among the general population. Of course, the Soviet government, with its inherent realism (far removed from that of Chamberlain), will hardly take any serious decisions in a hurry. Most likely, it will wait, think things over, weigh up the current situation and examine subsequent developments before undertaking any changes in our foreign policy. But I am speaking now not about the Soviet government, but about the mood of the general public.

‘Just don’t leave Spain, whatever you do!’ exclaimed Lloyd George.

And then he began to argue at great length that isolationism would be a bad policy for the USSR. I reassured my interlocutor once again that the Soviet government is not pursuing any consciously isolationist policies, but that isolationist sentiments do exist in some circles of our population, and that events such as Munich could only serve to intensify them.

Lloyd George has been reading a lot of Turgenev lately. He showed me a big pile of books – English translations of Turgenev – and asked me which one in particular I would advise him to commit to memory. I recommended Fathers and Sons.

[For the Soviet Union (and for Litvinov and Maisky personally), the Munich Agreement was a horrific setback. Litvinov’s ‘year-long and untiring efforts to realize his policy of collective security against Germany,’ reported the British ambassador from Moscow, ‘would appear … to have fallen into the water’; he ‘has scarcely been visible since his arrival’ from Geneva.

TNA FO 371 N5164/97/38, Chilston to Halifax, 18 Oct. 1938.

Increasingly identified with isolationist tendencies, Litvinov’s deputy, Potemkin, was little impressed by Maisky’s attempts to assure Narkomindel that the situation ‘was slowly beginning to change’.

A. Gromyko et al. (eds), Soviet Peace Efforts on the Eve of World War II (September 1938–August 1939) (Moscow, 1973) (hereafter SPE), doc. 10, 1 Oct. 1938.

Maisky was severely reproached for the failure to respond critically to the ‘deceitful inventions’ of Halifax and others regarding presumed ‘cooperation’ and ‘consultation’ with the Soviet Union prior to the Munich Agreement. Their objective, it was implied, had been to exonerate themselves and pin the blame on Moscow. ‘In your reports of these conversations,’ Maisky was reprimanded, ‘we fail to see a critical reaction … One gets the impression that you seriously accept this eyewash, which, however, should have been all too obvious to

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you.’

DVP, 1938, XXI, doc. 408, 3 Oct. 1938. See also Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security, pp. 195–7.

No wonder Maisky spared no effort in alerting both Churchill and Lloyd George, at great length, to the ‘absolutely false’ claims that the Russians had been privy to the Anglo-French settlement of the Czechoslovakia case.

As indicative of Maisky’s mood were his desperate attempts to meet an elusive Eden and the strikingly disproportionate space devoted in his diary to his public repudiation of Lord Winterton’s

Edward Turnour (6th Earl Winterton), chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, 1937–39; deputy to secretary of state for air, March–May 1938; member of the Cabinet, March 1938–January 1939.

claims that, because of its military weakness, the Soviet Union ‘confined itself to merely making vague promises’.

Lloyd George papers, LG/G/14/1/9, 4 Oct. 1938, Maisky to Lloyd George; Maisky to Churchill, reproduced in M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: The prophet of truth, 1922–1939 (London, 2009). SPE, pp. 1199–1200, 4 Oct. 1938. RAN f.1702 op.4 d.1357 l.4 & d.940 l.9 & d.1357 l.5, 5, 10 & 11 Oct. 1938, Eden to Maisky. See also, Izvestiya, 11 Oct. 1938, quoted in SPE, doc. 15. On the Winterton affair, see Maisky’s report to Moscow, God Krizisa, I, no. 21. Maisky further reported to Moscow that his refutations received due attention in the British press, DVP, 1938, XXI, doc. 419.

To satisfy Moscow, Maisky even arranged for a parliamentary question to be put to the prime minister. This led to a major (and disproportionate) debate on Winterton’s statement a week later.

Hansard, HC Deb 14 November 1938, vol. 341, cols 648–54.

It is hardly surprising that Maisky appeared henceforth to be ‘vague, mordant, and ominous’, barely concealing his ‘unutterable disgust with the Chamberlain policy’, which he feared would spawn a four-power pact leading to the institutionalized isolation of Russia.

Report by Te Water, the South African high commissioner, from London, quoted in Fry, ‘Agents and structures’, p. 310. See also McDonald, A Man of the Times, p. 44. When he met Cadogan on 30 September, Maisky was ‘disgruntled and complaining’; Dilks, Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 110.

He now regarded Chamberlain as ‘The Enemy’, while he nicknamed Halifax ‘The Bishop’ who ‘retires to pray and comes out a worse hypocrite than before’.

Webb, diary, 31 Oct. 1938, p. 6567.

The Soviet Union’s raging denunciation of the Munich Agreement should have alerted Chamberlain to the likelihood of Soviet reclusion and possibly its corollary, an accommodation with Hitler. Spending a leisurely weekend with the Webbs, Maisky revealed his cards: ‘he thought that the USSR would be cautious and discreet in her policy: she would tend to withdraw from world affairs in effect; meanwhile staying at Geneva awaiting a “change of heart” in the democratic powers’.

Webb, diary, 31 Oct. 1938, pp. 6566–7 (emphasis in original). In retrospect, Maisky indeed maintained that, in the wake of the Munich Agreement, the Soviet government decided ‘to have done with Geneva and retire into a well-protected isolation’; Dalton papers, II, 5/2, record of a meeting between Boothby and Maisky, 15 Sept. 1939. For a similar impression that was gained, see B.H. Liddell Hart, The Liddell Hart Memoirs (London, 1965), pp. 167, 194–5.

But in the absence of an alternative policy, Stalin was, for a while, dissuaded by Litvinov from withdrawing into isolation, particularly after Hitler’s seizure of Prague in March 1939. Yet Maisky’s existentialist need to preserve collective security led to an ambivalence, whereby ominous threats of isolation were combined with assurances to the contrary. ‘Whatever happens,’ Maisky assured Lord Strabolgi, ‘the USSR will continue its constant policy of peace and the resolute struggle against aggression.’

RAN f.1702 op.4 d.1115 l.1, 10 Oct. 1938; and Dalton, Fateful Years, p. 185; see also Aster, ‘Ivan Maisky and parliamentary anti-appeasement’, p. 336. Maisky told B. Pares, A Wandering Student: The Story of a purpose (London, 1948), p. 360, that the Russians would wait for another six months or so to see whether the British government would ‘stick’ to the Munich policy, and if they did, he warned, ‘we shall lock our own doors and see to our own defence’.

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Document Title1 October

AuthorLiakhovetsky, Ivan Mikhailovich (Maisky)

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Date1938 Oct 1

AOC VolumeThe Complete Maisky Diaries: Volume 1

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