Visited Butler. Total chaos in the corridors of the Foreign Office: filing cabinets, boxes, heaps of files, bundles of documents, etc. Virtually impossible to get through. I asked the attendant what the matter was. It turns out that the Foreign Office is building an anti-gas shelter and the basement has to be temporarily cleared…

[The ill winds of isolation blowing from the Kremlin in the wake of the Munich Agreement, further accentuated by Litvinov’s depression, disillusion and exclusion from the formulation of policy – increasingly firmly in the hands of Stalin and Molotov – drove Maisky into reclusiveness. But he was himself partly to blame: in his efforts to keep pace with the Kremlin, he had inflamed suspicions in Moscow by suggesting that Chamberlain was ‘deliberately promoting the “Ukrainian direction” of German aggression, in an attempt to prompt Hitler to embark on precisely such a course’.

God Krizisa, I, nos. 65, 66, 77 & 107. See also Bezymenskii, Stalin i Gitler, pp. 149–51.

At the same time, Maisky blatantly ignored his instructions to stay out of things, and instead tried to prod the British into action by sounding the alarm. To judge by Butler’s record of the meeting, Maisky acknowledged that ‘since Munich the Soviet Union had been hesitating before deciding on a policy of complete isolation’ and was bound to be discouraged by Chamberlain’s continued appeasement, which left no room for ‘friendship with Russia’. Maisky was nonetheless faithfully echoing Litvinov’s warnings to Seeds that if France and Great Britain were to ‘continue to capitulate’, the Soviet Union would ‘keep aloof all the more readily as their interests were not directly threatened’. No wonder Butler emerged from the meeting convinced that the Russians were ‘content to wait’ and would ‘pursue an isolationist policy’.

Vansittart papers, VNST 3/2, Seeds to Halifax on meeting Litvinov, 19 Feb. 1939, not mentioned in Litvinov’s report in DVP, 1939, XXII/1, doc. 103; TNA FO 371 23677 N669 & N1342/57/38; DVP, 1939, XXII/1, doc. 128. See also Maisky’s concern about isolation in his conversation in the same vein with L. Fischer in Men and Politics, pp. 556–7; J. Harvey (ed.), The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey 1937–1940 (London, 1970), pp. 259–60; and Liddell Hart, who gained the impression that Maisky was ‘very anxious about the possibility of Stalin turning away from Litvinov’s policy of trying to create a common front against Hitler’; The Liddell Hart Memoirs, p. 222.