Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky (; 19 January 1884 – 3 September 1975) was a Soviet diplomat, historian and politician who served as the Soviet Union's ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1932 to 1943, including much of the period of the Second World War.
Early career
Ivan Maisky was born Jan Lachowiecki in a nobleman's castle in Kirillov, near Nizhny Novgorod, where his father was working as a private tutor. His father was a Polish Jew who was a convert to Orthodox Christianity; his mother was Russian. He spent his childhood in Omsk, where his father worked as a military doctor.
Maisky's youth was very strongly influenced by the humanism of the Russian intelligentsia, and his favorite authors as a young man were William Shakespeare, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich Heine and Lord Byron. Maisky's values were shaped by growing up in an atheist, bookish and intellectual family who read the works of Alexander Herzen and Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Like much of the Russian intelligentsia, the Maisky family were opposed to the social order of Imperial Russia and saw serving "the people" as the highest virtue.
As a student at St. Petersburg University, he was profoundly influenced by the writings of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. While at university, he wrote poetry with his first poem being "I Wish To Be a Great Thunderstorm". In 1902, he was arrested for his political activities, and sent back to Omsk under police surveillance. In 1903 Maisky joined the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In January 1906 he was arrested for his part in the 1905 revolution and deported to Tobolsk. His sentence was later commuted and he was allowed to immigrate to Munich, where he obtained a degree in economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
In November 1912, Maisky moved to London and shared a house in Golders Green with Maxim Litvinov and Georgy Chicherin. As his English improved his circle of friends expanded to include George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Beatrice Webb. Beatrice Webb wrote that he was "one of the most open minded of Marxists, and is fully aware of the misfits in Marxian terminology—scholastic and dogmatic. But then he has lived abroad among infidels and philistines and his mind has been perhaps slightly contaminated by the foreign sophistical agnostic outlook on the closed universe of the Moscow Marxians". After the outbreak of war in 1914, he supported the Menshevik Internationalists, who were opposed to the war in a passive manner, acting as their main representative at a socialist conference in London in February 1915. This caused friction in his relationship with Litvinov, a Bolshevik, who supported Lenin's policy line of 'revolutionary defeatism', namely that the Bolsheviks should work actively for Russia's defeat as the best way of bringing about a revolution.
Maisky returned to Russia after the February Revolution, and served as deputy minister for labour in the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky. He opposed the Bolshevik Revolution, and as the Russian Civil War began, he moved to Samara. In July 1918, became minister for labor in the provisional government, known as the Komuch, who backed armed resistance to the Bolsheviks, for which he was expelled from the Menshevik party. He had to flee to Mongolia when Admiral Kolchak imposed a military dictatorship in Siberia in 1919. In Mongolia, he wrote a letter to Anatoly Lunacharsky praising the "boldness and originality" of the Bolsheviks, as compared with the "virtuous but talentless" Mensheviks, and on Lunacharsky's recommendation was allowed to join the Bolshevik party, and posted to Omsk as head of the Siberian section of Gosplan.
In January 1922, Maisky moved to Moscow as head of the press department of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs (Narkomindel), now headed by Chicherin and Litvinov, where he met Agnia Skripina, his third wife, but was later posted to Leningrad, where, in January 1924, he was appointed chief editor of the literary journal Zvezda. Under his editorship, the magazine was the only major publication in the Soviet Union not controlled by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) to encourage 'proletarian' literature, and have a representative of their movement on its board, while tolerating a range of critical opinion. Maisky personally tried to adopt a middle position between RAPP and their main opponent, Aleksandr Voronsky.
Diplomatic career
In 1925, Maisky was appointed counselor at the Soviet embassy in London, where he served during the turbulence of the Zinoviev letter, and the General Strike, acting up as de facto ambassador with the sudden death of the ambassador, Leonid Krasin, until he was forced to leave when Britain severed diplomatic relations with the USSR in May 1927. He was counsellor at the Soviet embassy in Tokyo in 1927–29. In April 1929, he became the Soviet Envoy to Finland.
Arrival in London In October 1932 he returned to London as the official Soviet ambassador to the Court of St James's, as the post was titled. He held it until 1943. The First Five Year Plan had been launched in 1928 intended to make the Soviet Union industrially and hence militarily self-sufficient, and as such Maisky's duties in London were at first primarily economic. The British cabinet minister whom Maisky negotiated the most was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, who told Maisky that his nation was the "most unfriendly country in the world" from the British viewpoint and he was not inclined to grant British trade credits to permit the exports of British machinery to assist with the First Five Year Plan. Chamberlain came to detest Maisky, whom he saw as sly trickster who never said what he meant and never meant what he said. In a letter to his sister Ida on 19 November 1932, Chamberlain condemned Maisky as difficult and dishonest, feelings that he was to retain when became prime minister in 1937.
Maisky cultivated a close relationship with the left-wing British intelligentsia. Some of Maisky's close friends in London included the economist John Maynard Keynes, the writer H.G. Wells and the playwright George Bernard Shaw. Maisky always saw his mission in London as a way to win over British public opinion to favoring closer ties with the Soviet Union.
The Australian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote: "Ivan Maisky was the epitome of the cosmopolitan intellectual whom Stalin and his team both despised and envied, and on top of that, a former Menshevik. A gregarious man, once in London he quickly grasped the mores of the English upper classes and established an extraordinary network of contacts." Maisky's circle of friends included a collection of politicians, businessmen, and intellectuals such as Anthony Eden, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Ramsay MacDonald, Lord Beaverbrook, Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb and Lady Astor.
Shortly after arriving in London, Maisky wrote: "An ambassador without excellent personal contacts is not worthy of the name". Maisky reported to Litvinov that his aim in London was "extending as widely as possible the series of visits which diplomatic etiquette imposes on a newly appointed ambassador, and in doing so to include not only the narrow circle of persons connected with the Foreign Office but also a number of members of the government, prominent politicians, people of the City and representatives of the cultural world". Beatrice Webb described Maisky as "not a fanatical Marxist" but as a man who takes "a broad view' and sees "the fanatical metaphysics and repression of today" as "temporary, brought about by past horrors and the low level of culture out of which the revolution started".
Advocate of collective security
Starting in 1934 when the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations, the proclaimed policy of the Soviet government was support for collective security under the banner of the League of Nations against aggression. The major foreign policy-related fear of Moscow was of facing a two-front war with Germany attacking in Europe and Japan attacking in Asia. Maxim Litvinov, the Foreign Commissar from 1930 to 1939 favored a policy of creating a bloc of states meant to deter aggression in both Europe and Asia, and felt the League's policy of collective security was the ideal means for forming such a bloc. The policy of supporting collective security under the League was in effect was a roundabout way of supporting the international system established after World War in Europe and Asia (which the Soviets had opposed until then) without actually saying so.
Maisky's task in London was to enlist British support for this policy. Maisky argued to the Foreign Office that both Japan and Germany were aggressive powers out to challenge the international order in Asia and Europe respectively, and that Britain should co-operate with the Soviet Union in upholding the international order against the "revisionist" powers. The same policy of resistance to fascist aggression under the League's collective security principles tended to be embraced by British anti-appeasers such as Winston Churchill as a way of defending the international order created by the Treaty of Versailles. That treaty was widely viewed by British public opinion in the interwar period as too harsh towards Germany, and insofar as Nazi foreign policy was aimed at revising its terms, British public opinion was broadly supportive of such efforts until March 1939.
While ambassador, Maisky addressed as many British audiences as possible in order to break through the air of hostility towards the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s, a task which Litvinov "encouraged Maisky to undertake in every way possible". Maisky was such an Anglophile that he wept at the funeral of King George V in 1936, which astonished many.
Robert Vansittart, a senior civil servant in the Foreign Office, arranged a dinner at his home at which Maisky first met Winston Churchill. Later, after a state banquet in honour of King Leopold of Belgium, in the presence of King George VI and of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Churchill made a point of being seen to have a long conversation with Maisky. Maisky took to cultivating the Canadian-born Media mogul Lord Beaverbrook. Lord Beaverbrook was the owner of a chain of newspapers that took a populist right-wing line, the most successful of which was the Daily Express.
Reflecting his Canadian origins, Beaverbrook believed in strengthening Britain's ties with the Commonwealth. He favored an isolationist line with regard to Europe, and therefore tended to support appeasement. However, Beaverbrook stated in a letter to Maisky in 1936 that he had a "friendly attitude" towards Stalin, and promised Maisky that "nothing shall be done or said by any newspaper controlled by me which is likely to disturb your tenure of office". Despite his support for "empire isolationism" and appeasement, Beaverbrook tended to take a fawning tone in his letters to Maisky and often called Stalin "your Great Leader". By contrast, the appeasers tended to dislike Maisky. Chamberlain called him a "revolting but clever little Jew."
A close collaborator of Maxim Litvinov, Maisky was an active member and the Soviet envoy to the Committee of Non-Intervention during the Spanish Civil War. The Non-Intervention Committee, which met in London, was mostly made up of the various ambassadors in London. Both Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador in London, and Dino Grandi, the Italian ambassador in London, did their best to sabotage the Non-Intervention Committee as both Germany and Italy had intervened in the Spanish Civil War by sending forces to fight alongside the Spanish Nationalists against the Spanish Republic.