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Table of Contents
The Complete Maisky Diaries: Volume 3
  • 10 January
  • 19 January
  • 20 January
  • 22 January
  • 26 January
  • 27 January
  • 30 January
  • 3 February
  • 4 February
  • 6 February
  • 11 February
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  • 25 February
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  • 13 March
  • 16 March
  • 17 March
  • 18 March
  • Conversation with Butler on 18 March 1940
  • 19 March
  • 23 March
  • 27 March
  • Conversation with Halifax on 27 March 1940
  • 28 March
  • 29 March
  • 1 April
  • 2 April
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© 2025
10 July
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By Liakhovetsky, Ivan Mikhailovich (Maisky)

The Complete Maisky Diaries: Volume 2

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10 July
Quite unexpectedly, after a six-week break (I last visited him on 26 May) Halifax invited me round. I arrived at six in the evening.
Halifax began with a semi-apology: he had nothing particular to tell me, but simply wanted to see me and have a chat. We hadn’t been in touch for so long, and the times are so complex and unstable.
I bowed to him and replied with a half-smile: ‘I’m entirely at your service.’
Halifax moved in his chair, crossed his long thin legs, and said: ‘Cripps has had a talk with Mr Stalin. A very useful and interesting one. They spoke quite frankly. I attach great importance to this exchange of opinions. We shall draw the appropriate conclusions.’
As the content of the talk was not known to me, I considered it best to maintain a polite silence and allow the foreign secretary to speak. For several minutes he elaborated in a rather nebulous way on the theme of Cripps’s meeting with C[omrade] Stalin, after which he asked me how long I had known Cripps and whether the Soviet government liked the new British ambassador. I replied politely, but in noncommittal fashion.
When this topic was exhausted, Halifax shifted his legs and asked in a somewhat melancholy tone: ‘Do you think that the misunderstandings which exist in the relations between our countries can really be dispelled?’
‘Yes, of course they can be dispelled,’ I replied, ‘if the British government takes a new political line. For the problem lies not so much in “misunderstandings” as in concrete actions.’
Halifax paused, as though he were digesting my words, before asking somewhat haltingly: ‘So in Moscow they think we were insincere in our negotiations last summer? That we did not actually want to come to an agreement?’
I replied that in his speech of 31 August, C[omrade] Molotov had expressed quite plainly our assessment of the Anglo-French stance at those negotiations. It was riven by internal contradictions. On the one hand, the British and the French feared Germany and wanted an agreement with the USSR. On the other, they feared that such an agreement might excessively strengthen the USSR. The failure of the negotiations was rooted in this contradiction.


Page 870

Halifax shrugged his shoulders and asked: ‘And do you, personally, agree with this analysis?’
‘I fully agree with it,’ I answered.
Halifax frowned and mentioned the difficulties caused during the negotiations by the formula of ‘indirect aggression’. I grinned and inquired: doesn’t Halifax now think, after the experience of ten months of war, that we were far more realistic in our appraisal of the methods of the current war than the British and the French? Halifax shrugged his shoulders again and remarked that the British and the French had feared that the formula of ‘indirect aggression’ might be exploited by the Soviet Union to take actions incompatible with international law in the Baltic States.
‘Your error last year,’ I objected, ‘and the error of your foreign policy in recent years in general, lies in the fact that you have always wanted to insure yourselves against every contingency. This is very difficult, perhaps even impossible. In practice, one always has to take a certain risk to achieve a result.’
‘For instance?’ Halifax asked with a somewhat twisted smile.
‘For instance, if you had made less of a fuss about the intricacies of international law last year, the result of the negotiations would probably have been different… And what is international law anyway?’
Halifax glanced at me with curiosity and asked: ‘What is it indeed?’
‘It is a set of precedents from the history of the right of might in international relations,’ I pronounced, measuring my words.
Halifax elaborated in his diary: ‘He amused me by his description of International Law as a combination of legal niceties originating in the will of the strongest Powers: cynical, but not altogether untrue.’ Halifax papers, diary, A7.8.4, 10 July 1940.
Halifax nodded and said, with interest suddenly flickering over his features: ‘There is much truth in that.’
He paused, his eyes raised to the ceiling, sighed, and asked me a surprising question: ‘Do you think that a time will ever come when international matters will cease to be resolved by force?’
His question rather took me aback, but I immediately replied that not only did I think such a time would come, I was firmly convinced of it.
‘When?’ Halifax persisted.
‘I fear that we will diverge in our treatment of this issue,’ I replied, ‘because the question of wars vanishing from international relations is closely tied to the concept of the economic man of which you disapprove.’
I was alluding to the speech Halifax made before Oxford students a few months ago, in which he attacked the concept of the economic man.
Halifax smiled and asked me to flesh out my thought a little. I briefly explicated our notion of the causes of war and of the conditions under which they could be eliminated. By way of illustration, I referred to the experience gained by Russia and the USSR in handling ethnic minorities. Halifax listened to me attentively and suddenly said: ‘Nevertheless, not everyone in your country agreed with the new regime created by the revolution.’


Page 871

‘Of course they didn’t,’ I replied. ‘It goes without saying that the 130,000 landlords who used to govern Russia did not agree with the new regime. But what of that?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Halifax, as if he were apologizing, ‘you adhered to the philosophy that the good of the majority justifies the suffering of the few.’
I confirmed that this was so. Halifax then asked whether I believed the landlords in England to be as bad as they were in Russia, and whether they could expect the same fate. I replied that I was insufficiently familiar with the English conditions to take a definite view, but that I felt it was wrong to draw excessively literal parallels. Russia was an agrarian country, so the question of landlords was central to our revolution. England is an industrial country, so here it is not the landlords, but the bankers and industrialists who play the key role. My remark seemed to flatter Halifax and he added with relief: ‘Our landlords will be taxed out of existence, but I don’t think we’ll have an agrarian revolution… I’m sure, for instance, that everybody in my village would be sorry if something happened to my family.’
I looked at Halifax and recalled that I had heard the same words from many landlords in Saratov before the 1905 revolution. But in the year of the revolution furious peasants burned down their estates. Does history really repeat itself?
That was the end of our philosophizing. Halifax moved on to current events.
Halifax wrote in his diary: ‘With Maisky I had a general talk in order to keep relations warm. He was quite interesting from his beastly Bolshevik point of view about the Russian land system’; Halifax papers, diary, A7.8.4, 10 July 1940.
First of all, he asked what was happening in those parts of Poland which were transferred to the Soviet Union last year. I answered that they have become an organic part of our country, that elections are being held there, and that they are gradually adapting to the new life. Halifax then asked whether we thought it desirable to restore Poland as an independent state. He cited the opinion of Boheman
Erik Carlsson Boheman, Swedish state secretary for foreign affairs, 1938–45, ambassador to the United Kingdom, 1947–48.
(a Swedish deputy foreign minister), who told Halifax some time ago that in his view it would be better for the sake of European peace if the Soviet Union and Germany shared a common border, rather than having Poland between them as a buffer state. Such a buffer would represent [illegible] in European politics. I replied that the question of Poland cannot be resolved in abstract terms: it all depends on what kind of Europe we have in mind – a Europe governed by the ‘international law’ about which we had been speaking, or a Europe in which war would be eliminated once and for all. I added that the current views of my government on the question of Poland were not known to me.
Halifax asked whether the new border between the Soviet Union and Rumania had been definitively fixed. I answered in the affirmative. Halifax


Page 872

inquired, not without suspicion, whether we had any more wishes with regard to the Balkans. He was obviously alluding to today’s press report about the Soviet Union’s ‘ultimatum’ to Turkey. I laughed and said: ‘Do you remember the little folk tale I told you last September, when the eastern parts of Poland passed over to us?’
‘I recall it,’ Halifax grinned. ‘So now the peasant has recovered all his stolen property?’
‘More or less,’ I replied in the same tone.
‘How do you see it?’ Halifax continued. ‘Is the population of Bessarabia content with the changes that have befallen it?’
‘That depends who you mean,’ I answered. ‘The Bessarabian landlords, of course, are not best pleased, but the Bessarabian peasants are, just as obviously, quite content. For them, transferral to the USSR signifies national freedom and the improvement of their material well-being.’
I told Halifax that the Soviet government had already passed a resolution to establish the thirteenth Union Republic – that of Moldavia – and that the reforming of Bessarabian agriculture according to the Soviet model had already begun.
‘Don’t you think,’ Halifax continued, ‘that the Balkans might be drawn into the war in the near future?’
I expressed my doubts about this. Halifax also admitted that he is not expecting a military conflict in the Balkans at present: Germany and Italy are against it.
Then he asked: ‘Imagine that Hitler is run over by a bus tomorrow or that he is forced to quit the stage for some reason or other: would the present German regime be able to hang on? I doubt it. Neither Göring, nor Goebbels nor Hess, nor anyone else would be able to preserve it.’
I objected that this was too simplistic. After the death of Piłsudski, it was widely believed that the regime he had created would collapse in a few months, but in reality this did not happen.
‘But the regime of Beck, Edward Śmigły-Rydz
Edward Śmigły-Rydz, commander-in-chief of the Polish army in 1939; fled to Rumania, September 1939.
and others was rotten through and through,’ Halifax retorted with somewhat unexpected fervour. ‘The war proved it.’
‘I completely agree with you,’ I parried. ‘The internal regime in Poland was rotten, but it was already rotten under Piłsudski. The decay became more evident under Piłsudski’s successors, but they hung on to power for four years and might still be there now were it not for the war.’


Page 873

My example seemed to impress Halifax and he wanted to say something more when his secretary entered the room and reported that Lord Lloyd (the minister for the colonies) wished to see him urgently. Halifax’s face clouded over and he said, rising from his chair: ‘We must meet again and have a chat… It is so important to share our thoughts at this time: after all, we are entering a new world.’
We parted.
My conclusions:
(1) In general, Halifax, like many other representatives of the ruling upper crust, is full of dark forebodings and understands that the war will deprive the elite of its privileges. At a certain point, this could push him toward a ‘rotten peace’ with Hitler.
(2) In particular, as a consequence of the growing swell of opinion against Chamberlain, which this time is also hitting Halifax hard, the latter has to manoeuvre, and considers it profitable to demonstrate his contact with the Soviet ambassador. I doubt that this will help him.
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Document Title10 July
AuthorLiakhovetsky, Ivan Mikhailovich (Maisky)
RecipientN/A
RepositoryN/A
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DescriptionN/A
Date1940 Jul 10
AOC VolumeThe Complete Maisky Diaries: Volume 2
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