 Welcome. My name is Bill Burns. I'm the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. At a moment when professional diplomacy is under siege, and at a moment when relations between Russia and the West are as grim and complicated as they've been in many years, Yvonne Meisky's diaries are remarkably vivid and illuminating. As he navigates both the hard world of Stalin's purges and the fading glamour of British high society, Meisky offers an elegant reminder of the role of diplomacy at its best and of the mix of delusion and hubris that clouded a Europe sliding toward war. For Meisky, the heart of diplomacy was simply put direct contact with people. Enduring his 11 years as Stalin's envoy in London, he did just that. He befriended and gained the trust of some of the most important figures in British politics and public life from Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George to H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Gabriel Gordetsky's discovery of these diaries and his extraordinary efforts to study, translate, and edit them have resulted in a truly unique contribution to diplomatic history. The diaries not only expose the inner workings of the Soviet system, but also the mistakes and missed opportunities in Moscow and London as war steadily approached. This, of course, is not the first time Gabriel's scholarship has changed our understanding of history or our thinking about policy. From the German invasion of Russia to Anglo-Soviet and Israeli-Soviet relations and countless other issues in Russian and Soviet foreign policy, Gabriel has broken new ground time and again, collecting accolades and distinguished university appointments along the way and the admiration of so many of us who have tried to apply history in the policy arena. We first met last fall at Old Souls College, Oxford, and it is truly an honor to host Gabriel today at Carnegie and to celebrate his work. Joining Gabriel for this evening's conversation is Stroke Talbot, a fellow traveler in Soviet memoirs, a scholar statesman of the First Order, a beautiful writer in his own right, and someone who's so much of a Russia hand that he wrote the book on. Like everyone who tried to follow Stroke, I've always been at least one step behind, from the deputy secretary's office in Foggy Bottom to Think Tank Row here on Massachusetts Avenue, and I truly can't think of anyone who'd rather join me in historical time travel or on the front lines of policy. After Gabriel's presentation, he and Stroke will sit down for a discussion and then open up the conversation to all of you. So, thank you so much for coming this evening, and I hope you'll join me in a warm welcome for Gabriel Gordetsky. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I would like to thank first and foremost Ambassador Bill Burns for giving me the opportunity of talking to you this evening. And of course, Ambassador Stroke Talbot for agreeing to make some comments on my talk later on. So, Count Gondomar was a Spanish ambassador to London from 1613 to 1622, and despite the deep hostility that existed between the two countries in the wake of the bitter war of 1585 to 1604, Gondomar succeeded in cultivating numerous powerful intimate friends at the court of King James I. More than 300 years later, in 1942, an alarm was sounded in the corridors of the phone office in London. Never since Gondomar grumbled Alexander Cadogan, who was the frustrated undersecretary of state, have we allowed a foreign ambassador to interfere so much in our domestic affairs as we do with Meisky. He went on to warn that no restrictions are placed on Meisky to prevent him doing pretty well anything he likes, and he's making very plentiful use of free access to all cabinet ministers and others whenever he wishes to. Now, if we assume that Ambassador Stroke Talbot's task is in fact to penetrate the inner decision-making circles of his host government and paint a comprehensive picture of the personalities and factors that shape its foreign policy, then Meisky clearly had few equals as an ambassador in the 20th century. A son of a Jewish Polish doctor and a Russian Orthodox school teacher, Meisky grew up in a conspicuously middle-class bourgeois environment in Tombs, Siberia. He joined the Menshevik Party, the more moderate faction of Russian socialism, while studying at the University of St. Petersburg. Following the 1905 Revolution, he was arrested and sent to exile first in Siberia and then expelled to Germany. When the clouds of the First World War gathered, the Pennyless Meisky joined the large community of Russian political exiles in London where he spent the next five years. There he forged an intimate and lifelong friendship with fellow exiled Marxist Georgi Tcheren and Maxim Litvino, who for two decades were to steal Soviet foreign policy as commissars for foreign affairs. Shortly after the February Revolution of 1917, Meisky returned to Russia and joined Kerensky's moderate provisional government. During the Civil War, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, he was an active member of a socialist anti-Bolshevik opposition government set up in Samara. Indeed, at one point he even found himself associated with the white general called Chuck. So it is indeed a testament to his political skills that he let us survive the purges and remain the ambassador in London despite his active role in the sole armed socialist insurgents against the Bolsheviks. Back in Moscow, after two years of fugitive life in outer Mongolia, his fraternal relations with Tcheren and Litvino proved to be most useful. In 1925, after making a formal humiliating repentance on the front pages of Pravda, his outstanding linguistic and intellectual abilities earned for him the post of a councillor at the London Embassy for two years before he was assigned a similar position in Tokyo. It was followed by a meteoric rise to the ambassadorial post in Helsinki, and the hasty decision to appoint Meisky as ambassador in London at the end of 1932 reflected Litvino's surprisingly early recognition that Weimar Germany was on her last leg and that the advance of Nazism required a drastic turn about in relations with Great Britain. Pulling conscious of the historical significance of his work, Meisky wasted no time in starting to write an extraordinary revealing diary of his 11 years as ambassador, which covers arguably the most dramatic period of the 20th century. And like Churchill, Meisky, regardless of his Marxist beliefs, was fascinated by the role of great men in shaping history. Indeed, he was fully conscious of his own role. A few more minutes he writes in the diary describing a crucial meeting with Churchill in September 1941, when the fate of Moscow hung in the air. And an important, perhaps decisive historical moment, brought with the greatest consequences, will be upon us. Will I rise to the occasion? Do I possess sufficient strength, energy, cunning, agility and wit to play my role with maximum success for the USSR and for all mankind? Not a very modest person. His unique diary is the only one to have been written by any Soviet politician or diplomat during Stalin's horrifying reign of terror in the 1930s and the 40s, when no one dared put a pen to paper. Now, you may well wonder, how did I come across such a sensational document? Well, like most historical discoveries, it was sheer serendipity. In 1993, I was approached by the Israeli and Russian foreign ministers David Levy and Igor Ivanov with a proposal to edit for publication an official joint collection of documents on the turbulent history of Israeli-Russian relations. While we were selecting the documents for all the volumes at the archives of the Russian foreign ministry, the archivists suddenly remembered that the earliest contacts established between the Zionist organization and the Soviet Union were recorded by Maeski in his diary. He went down to the stacks and emerged with volume for 1941, holding 294 pages just for this dramatic year. This is the cover. You can well imagine how I was knocked off my feet, presented with such a treasure trove. The immediate impression it conveyed as I devoured it was the pivotal role of the human factor transcending controversies of a policy in ideology. It unraveled the immense impact of personal friendships, conflicts and rivalries within the Kremlin in the formulation of Soviet foreign policy, as well as the execution of foreign policy abroad. Even at the peak of Stalin's totalitarianism, terror and purges. I should stress that this aspect is an entire missing facet of Soviet and Russian politics in Western historiography, where personalities remain pretty much anonymous, if not caricature-like. It was an eye-opener for me to find how much the vie quotidien culture and modus operandi at the heart of Soviet officialdom did not reflect the Marxist ideology, but rather the legacy of Imperial Russia. And one thing that I was lucky enough to get on top of the diary was access to my ski's rather hidden private archives, and in them I found his personal photo albums, and they give a fantastic image, evidence of what I'm saying just now in words. So what I would like to do really fast is go through some photos taken within the embassy. Don't forget that this is 1932, so close to the Russian Revolution. And we have very clear image of the pioneers and the ideological facet of life in the embassy. And what turns out actually to be more of the Russian, the legacy of the Russian imperial period. So here is my ski and his wife having scones and tea. This is an incredible photo of a my ski entertaining Litvinov and his wife in one of the private rooms. And had you not known that this was my ski and Litvinov, you would have thought this is actually St. Petersburg in the 19th century, a sort of tea salon. As you can see at that time at least you could still have tigers on the walls rather than other figures. And then rather than the pioneers, I was struck really by those photos, you know, which show what really the kids in the embassy liked or did. Now this is the entrance. It still is the residence of the Russian ambassador in London today. And these are the staircase. This is the staircase. As you can see, you can very well see the relationship between my ski and his wife. I will not have to elaborate on that. And what is interesting, if you look behind her, there is a landscape painting of Russia in the 19th century. This is 1936. Now we move one year ahead into the terror and this is the same place, 1937. And of course the happier days in Sochi. The reason I'm showing you this photo is because, this is my ski's wife, because when they went to Sochi from London at that time, she's doing something which was unheard of in Russia at that time. She's wearing trousers, which we will take for granted today, but no Russian women at that time, no Russian woman would be wearing trousers. So you can see the influence of the Western hair. And of course the trips in Europe, which are the sort of classical. So as a diarist, my ski possessed a discerning grasp of his interlocutors, his extraordinary memory, and hence by penetrating psychological insight, piercing observation and insatiable curiosity turned him into one of the most astute witnesses of Britain and international affairs in the 1930s. The diary is laden with vignettes. Anthony Eden, my ski writes for example in 1937, is not made of iron, but rather of soft clay, which yields easily to the fingers of a skillful artisan. And you can see the skillful artisan there. He nicknamed Eden's successor, the Pisa Lord Halifax, who actually was a member of All Souls College in Oxford, who was a devout member of the Church of England and who was captivated by Hitler's charms when he visited him in Berthes Garden in 1937. He called him the bishop, a man who retires to pray and comes out worse hypocrite than before. Neville Chamberlain, who as he wrote to his sister, Neville Chamberlain, was scornful of the revolting but clever little Jew, did not escape my ski's own sharp observation. Parliament met at six in the evening, my ski describes in his diary the Prime Minister's declaration of war on Hitler on September 1939. Chamberlain, looking terribly depressed and speaking in a quiet, lifeless voice, confessed that 18 months ago he prayed not to have to take upon himself the responsibility of declaring war, but now he fears that he will not be able to avoid it, a dark and emaciated face, a tearful, broken voice, bitter, despairing gestures, a shattered, washed-up man. He could not hide the thick that catastrophe had befallen him. I sat listening and thought, this is the leader of the great empire on a crucial day of its existence, an old, leaky, faded umbrella. He is not the head of the British empire, but its grave digger. Now, when my ski arrived in London, he was instructed by the Kremlin to cultivate the conservatives considered to be the real bosses in Britain, rather than labor and the left. He wasted little time in submitting to Litvino a radical working plan which would characterize an innovative and unconventional diplomacy marked by the then unprecedented recourse to the press and to person diplomacy, he claimed it, and I quote, extending as widely as possible the series of visits which diplomatic etiquette imposes on newly appointed ambassador. The gallery of people my ski engaged in is indeed breathtaking. Obviously, pursuing such an innovative diplomacy was hardly an easy task in Britain, but just as much vis-a-vis the Kremlin. In 1940, for instance, a series of harsh telegrams from Moscow severely criticized my ski's diplomatic methods. He was ordered to confine his encounters to two top officials at the phone office and to obtain all necessary information from the published media. Now, following such instructions would have robbed my ski of his trump card, his prolific circle of interlocutors, and pressed against the wall, he resorted to a brave and fascinating nine pages visionary lecture to the ministry on modern diplomacy. Much of it, I think, is still so pertinent for today. The document exposed the wide scope of contacts and the systematic methods employed in recruiting them. The most important substantive element in the work of every ambassador he persevered was the actual contact he has with people. It is not sufficient to read the newspapers. That can be done in Moscow. An ambassador without excellent personal contacts is not worthy of the name. He then calculated that he had to maintain durable intimate relations with at least 500 people. This means, he sums up, that one must meet the contact more or less regularly, invite him to breakfast or dinner, visit him at home, take him to the theater from time to time, go when necessary to the wedding of his son or his daughter, wish him many happy returns on his birthday, or sympathize with him when he is ill. It is only when your acquaintance has come a little closer to you an Englishman need to scrutinize someone for quite some time before they consider him to be one of the friends that his tongue starts to loosen and only then may you start to glean things from him or else start to put the necessary ideas into his head. So it is astounding to discover from the diary what a vast room for manoeuvre was left to a diplomat on the ground even during Stalinist Russia. Indeed, as an ambassador, Moscow did not hesitate to transgress diplomatic conventions and etiquette courting backbenchers in parliament, newspaper editors, trade unionists, writers, artists, bankers in the city and intellectuals of all political shades. But above all, he gained the confidence of the top politician of the day. The close personal conducts established with foreign secretaries and senior officials at the foreign office was unprecedented. The next two photos, I think, tell the tale very vividly. They show Muskie sending chamberlings powerful advisor and right-hand man Horace Wilson to Moscow in 1939. Sorry, this is just the show. This is a very unusual photo. It is unusual in the sense that at that period people would not touch each other. They would not shake hands. But here you can see the closeness that had been established between the two. And then seeing Eden and his wife to Moscow. One can feel really the intimacy in 1935. It was, in fact, Muskie who orchestrated Eden's important visit to Moscow. Arriving in Moscow in 1935. This is a historical photo because this is the first ride of the Moscow metro before Stalin. Stalin actually went first time in April 1935 but they could not resist the temptation of doing a sort of potyomkin village. They had only two or three stations linked at that time and having Eden shown off with the metro. And it was also the visit turned out to be Eden's first meeting with the western minister since the revolution. All of that was actually initiated personally by Muskie himself. And Muskie further secured the second crucial visit of Eden to Moscow shortly after the German invasion of Russia in December 1941. By far the most striking were the intimate relations that Muskie struck with Churchill into the Russian coast. Here you can see him with Lloyd George and Anthony Eden and, of course, with Churchill. Even when Churchill was stealing the wilderness and on the fringes of British politics. A short excerpt from a five-page description of Muskie's first visit to Churchill's country home at Sherwell, a few weeks before the Munich agreement to give you the sense of the intimacy and the way Muskie exploited it to advance Soviet interest. So it's 4th of September 1938. I visited Churchill in his country state. A wonderful place, 84 acres of land. A huge green hollow on the hill extends the host two-story stone house large and tastefully presented. The three of us went to have tea. Churchill, his wife, and I. On the table, apart from the tea, lay a whole battery of diverse alcoholic drinks. Why could Churchill ever do without them? He drank a whiskey soda and offered me a Russian vodka from before the war. He has somehow managed to preserve this rarity. I expressed my sincere astonishment, but Churchill interrupted me. Apart from being old, in my cellar, I have a bottle of wine from 1793. Not bad, huh? I am keeping it for a very special, truly exceptional occasion. Which exactly may I ask you? Churchill grinned cunningly, posed, then suddenly declared, We'll drink this bottle together when Great Britain and Russia beat Hitler's Germany. Now I have to remind you that this is before the Munich agreement, so in fact, we are in the mids or in the heights, in fact, of appeasement. But there is already the alliance being built up through the efforts of Meiske and Churchill together. As striking, and certainly a novelty in the diplomatic practices of time, was the way Meiske cultivated a significant segment of the British press with consummate skill. Quoting Lord Beaverbrook, the press magnate and later influential member of Churchill's war cabinet, certainly paid off, his paper, The Daily Express, kept hailing the rise of Stalin as a defender of Soviet national interest, rather than of the idea of world revolution. In autumn 1936, Beaverbrook reminded Meiske of his newspapers friendly attitude towards Stalin and promised in a letter to Meiske that nothing shall be done or said by any newspaper controlled by me, which is likely to disturb your tenure of office in London. And then persuasion was often rewarded by boons. I venture to keep my promise to you, Meiske wrote to Beaverbrook, and hope you'll enjoy the sample of Russian vodka and sending. The sample was always a crate of bottles of vodka. And as we heard from Ambassador Burns, Meiske's influence was not confined to the top politicians and governmental institutes. He turned the Russian embassy really into the maker for the British elite and most prominent intellectuals and artists of the time, regardless of class and political affinity. The economist Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Cho, H.G. Wells, the socialist Beatrice Webb, the legendary pianist Myra Hess, who played concerts in the National Gallery in London throughout the German Blitz, the famous Afro-American singer Paul Robson, who sought refuge in London from racism and persecution, the avant-garde sculpture Epstein, who made his bust, well described in the diary, the famous Austrian painter Kokoschka on exile in Britain, who produced an intriguing portrait of him and scores of other. Indeed, by the time Russian-Britain were allied in June 1941, Meiske had become the most popular and sought-after foreigner in London. It was he rather than Stalin who was now associated with the Russian valiant fighting on the Eastern Front. Indeed, considering Meiske's modus operandi, it is hardly surprising to discover that much of the information, the Kremlin gleaned from London, did not necessarily emanate from spies, such as the Cambridge Five, but was rather garnered by Meiske himself directly from the top British politicians and officials whom he befriended. They all spoke candidly and openly with the soft ambassador, sharing with him a time as Churchill had done, and I quote Meiske's own words, the lips of cypher telegrams. Quite a number of entries touched on the Anglo-Soviet American Triangle. Meiske recognized the ascent of the United States as the major power in the world politics long before the British would admit to it. He spared no effort attempting to safeguard Soviet interests vis-à-vis the United States. Among his frequent interlocutors was the American ambassador in London, Joe Kennedy, whom he described as quite a character, tall, strong, with red hair, energetic dresses, a loud voice and booming infectious laughter, a real embodiment of the type of healthy and vigorous businessman that is so abundant in the United States, a man without psychological complications and lofty dreams. And during the Battle of Britain, Kennedy impressed Meiske with, and I quote, a gloomy view of British prospects. He doubts that England will be able to wage a long war single-handedly. He thinks it utterly inevitable that England will be almost completely destroyed by air raids. Kennedy scolded the British government for failing to come to an agreement with the Soviet Union last year and said that the upper classes of British society are completely rotten, a rather unexpected judgment from a man of his status. And his impression of John Winnon, Kennedy's successor, was somewhat more benign. Tall, dark hair, with slow, demure manners, a listless, burly, audible voice, and pensive, introspective look, he's a polar opposite of predecessor, the vociferous, jaunty, loquacious and flighty Joe Kennedy. I had to strain my ears to catch Winnon's words. Now, although Stalin's terror had been examined in depth in recent years, the study of the impacted head on the conduct of Soviet foreign policy had been surprisingly overlooked by historians. The terror led to a wiping out of the old guard at the commissariat, leaving only Mysky and two other ambassadors alive at their post when the Second World War broke out. Even within his embassy, the military attaché and the head of the trade delegation were recalled and shot. By 1938, the brother of Mysky's wife, Agnia, was sent to the Gulag and then shot. She suffered a nervous breakdown in London. Unknown to the British government then, and historians since, Mysky was recalled to Moscow in the summer of 1938 in the midst of the Czechoslovakian crisis, supposedly to spend the summer vacation in a resort near Moscow. In fact, he was interrogated and confronted with false confessions made by the members of his embassy before they had been shot. He was then allowed to return to London on probation. His presence there, indispensable for the Kremlin with the Munich crisis looming. And photos can often capture drama better than thousands of words, even if the photographer is not conscious of what he's recording. In mid-April 1939, Mysky was recalled again to Moscow for a crucial meeting in the Kremlin. Hardly known or dealt with by historians so far. Where the possibility of veering a course towards Germany was considered in Ernst for the first time. More than ever before, it seemed that Mysky's personal fate was seen. And I'll show you four photos. This is still winning. So this is Mysky living with his wife at the Jordan-Landens airport on the way to Moscow. You can judge for yourself what his feelings are. Here is arriving in Moscow. And here is his return to London. And if I juxtapose the two, you can get the sense of it. So, a cosmopolitan, a polyglot, independent-minded, informed and mentioned with Jewish roots, Mysky was particularly vulnerable. He nonetheless miraculously survived the terror. However, when Churchill praised him to Stalin as a first straight ambassador in 1942, he drew from the dictated, the snippy comment that Mysky spoke too much and could not keep his tongue between his teeth. Which is, of course, very lucky for us today. The many personality cult in London which surrounded Mysky and the fact that he had gone, perhaps, a little bit too native in Britain was hardly watched with equanimity in the Kremlin. The most so even as he was observed to wipe a tearful eye during the funeral of the Tsar's cousin, King George V. In 1942, Pavlov, Stalin and Molotov's interpreter returned from London with a devastating critique of Mysky's residency. I felt he informed his superiors in the Kremlin that my presence has disrupted the English daily routine of my hosts. No one that in June 1943 Mysky was finally recalled home despite unheard of appeals from Eden and the British ambassador in Moscow to keep him in London. In 1953, at the age of 70, he was finally arrested, accused of treason, having lost his feelings for the motherland. He was scarcely saved by the bell when Stalin died two weeks later. Mysky was nonetheless to spend another two years in prison having been caught up in the web of Kremlin intrigue surrounding various bits of power. He was rehabilitated in 1960, elected the Russian Academy of Science and died from natural causes in his bed in 1975 at the ripe age of 91. Thank you very much. Wow. Gabriel, first congratulations on a magnificent job. I've just started to read the book. It's a masterpiece. You got a about as nice a blurb from Paul Kennedy that I've ever seen on a book. But let's get to a couple of the very interesting things that you just said about this extraordinary diplomat and survivor. Let's maybe start with something you said close to the end. He not only was charged with high treason, he confessed it. What's your take on why he did that? He confessed he confessed it because he had learned from the past that the only possibility perhaps of getting some sort of mercy was by confession rather than by giving an account of things which could be easily easily contradicted either by the existence of the diary or other written material that he had written. In that respect he was, in fact, there were very few who did not confess like Bochow and others, but his way was always there were two models of resistance of coping with Stalin. The first was the one that my skills, which was to try and lure him or massages, ego and so on. Standing up to him. Standing up to him was Litvinov's way of doing it, so in 1938 when he fell out of favor he went straight to the Kremlin, knocked on Stalin's door and said to him, I understand that you're about to shoot me. And then Stalin would react by saying, what nonsense, I mean who told you these kind of things. And when a year later they tried to run over him he immediately called the Kremlin and said, will you tell your drivers to stop doing these sort of obesity. So that was the second way. There were two tactics you could use to try really and overcome it. And Meiske was not a brave man. He was a survivor but not a brave man. He was a smart survivor but not a brave man. One of the great ironies and a number of them came out in your talk is that he would make himself into a kind of protege of probably the ugliest and most cruel of all of the Stalin's circle and that's Beria. How did that come about? Well, he wasn't the protege of Beria until in fact he was arrested and almost shot. So his real rival was Molotov who was also Litvinovs. One of the interesting things that comes out of the book is we have a rather monotonous and simplistic view of what Russian foreign policy was over Russian politics and anyone who knows Russia knows how personal it is. So there were incredible rivalries even understanding within the system and the major rivalry was between Molotov and the Russian Marxists and those who had been abroad in the cosmopolitan like Litvinov. And so what happened was that when Litvinov was kicked out of his office 1939 and in Maski was left on his own actually Molotov waited for the opportunity of settling the account with him that came with the arrest of Maski in 1953. When Stalin died all those who had been arrested were released but not Maski. This was a personal sort of action taken by Molotov to keep him there and then started the process of Beria's attempts Beria himself personally interrogated Maski during those two weeks and then Maski was invited he didn't know that Stalin died because nobody had told him and so he was invited to he was at the Lubyanka in the downstairs and he was invited to Beria's room and Beria said well everything that was that you had been accused though was actually false but we have to rehabilitate you because Russians are extremely bureaucratic in the way they do and he said the thing is that Beria was a very complex figure we always think only about him as being the master of terror his sadism and so on but he was also deliberate and he had those plans in fact of seizing power in 1953 continuing the spirit of the Grand Alliance he was an anglophile he had a huge library British history books and so on and he thought Maski would be his best asset and he wanted to in fact appoint him after the coup as his foreign minister so he said to Maski we have to rehabilitate you so for now we'll put you and your wife in a room next to mine and you can prepare the ground for the rapprochement he didn't tell him he was going to seize power but you'll have a major role in the future after we rehabilitate and then of course there was the coup against Beria and he was shot and Molotov and the rest of the gang came into the Lubyanka and they find Maski settled there in a suit and so they sent him down to prison for two more years you think let me back up looking through the book and reading a couple of the very good reviews of it Jonathan Steele of The Guardian has a terrific review and so does Michael and Natya has one in the New York review of books both of them make the point that this book is a chronicle of anti-Semitism in two cultures Soviet culture and British do you think that one of the reasons he was looking death in the face at the end of his career was because of the doctor's plot and all of that absolutely because he was arrested this part of it but here comes the catch really because Maski actually was not Jewish I mean he had a Jewish father but his mother was Russian so he did not consider himself to be Jewish however everyone else did so you could I read this sort of quote of Chamberlain saying this clever little Jew and of course he was perceived to be Jewish by the Russians so he became a victim of anti-Semitism without actually himself being a Jew and so for instance I mean Gorlans who was the famous left-wing publisher in Britain and himself a Jew he would tell him jokes and he would tell him Jewish jokes and he would say to Gorlans oh I've just heard a fantastic Armenian joke and he would tell him then the Jewish joke and whenever Gorlans told him Jewish jokes he would say oh this is a great Armenian joke so he really tried to distance himself very much but then it hit him very hard when Hitler came to power because it was obvious that he would have been despite the fact that he wasn't fully Jewish that he would be a victim in a similar system and that drew him a little bit closer to the Jews and then there is a really interesting episode I have no time to get into how he went to Palestine on his way back to Moscow in 1943 and conducted the first most important negotiations which would eventually lead to the Soviet support of the partition plan and that's a different story so this is more or less the Jewish side of things you might share with our audience the intellectual punishment and torture really that he had the space when he was in jail so when he was eventually jailed as I said he was 70 he had managed just think about it all his life he had his sword hanging over his head for different reasons I mean the fact that he was a Menshevik that he was a right-wing Menshevik that he was in Karenski's government of Kolchak Kolchak fought against the Bolsheviks then ambassadors at the time when all ambassadors being perceived to be Jewish so it was a daily affair that he had to sort of contend with and so he was raised at age of 70 in 1953 actually accused of the thing that he didn't think he was and and then when Molotov eventually got his clothes on him after Stalin's death they thought what would be the best punishment for Menshevik and as he had been really intellectual as you could see if you read the book which of course I recommend you do so you would find out that in fact he would have been had the revolution not interfered in his life he would have become a professor of literature since an early age he wrote poetry and poetry and poetry and the novel and the diary which is highly literary and so when Molotov came and knew of his weakness they deprived him for the two years he was in prison of pen and paper and so he was unable to write anything so he overcame this by composing 18 poems and then running them by heart which described the process of his arrest the jail everything in 18 and when he came out of prison he put them on paper and I found them in the in his private archive in my last chapter on the very affair it's actually based on a large extent on this and other appearance Could you maybe give us a little bit of his relationship with Litvinov I would think without having read the book all that they would actually be quite convivial they were convivial and they were problematic and again a very Russian story so they were problematic because they spent this time together in exile in Britain the five years in Hampstead I mean all the exile met regardless of what their political standing was but Litvinov was and had been a Bolshevik and Mysky was a Menshevik this was a stain for him always so if you read Gromyko's the Russian edition of his diaries you will see how he really attacks heavily Mysky but mostly because of this stain of his probably also the antisemitism as an edition and and so my feeling about it is that I lost the straight of my you're doing great just remember about yes Litvinov so the thing about Litvinov there he was a Menshevik and so they were close like Kolontai the third ambassador I didn't mention was Kolontai the famous feminist who was the first female ambassador in the world she was posted in Stockholm and was a close intimate friend of his but she had been a Menshevik by the way all the three as you can see all the three ambassadors the third one being the one in France were all Mensheviks which is also interesting why did Stalin keep the Mensheviks alive and killed all the Bolshevik ambassadors so the relations were problematic on the one hand there was this split the core of the exile this feeling you know of the Russian exile colony and Mysky definitely made the profit out of it throughout his career and I have some interesting I think material on the 20s when Mysky sort of maneuvers his way in the foreign ministry on the basis of this special relation but there was also a bit of this antagonism of seeing Mysky as not the real Bolshevik as not the real ideologies which in fact was the case he was really a Menshevik and remained a Menshevik although he declared himself to be a Bolshevik there is another episode that strikes me as surprising and a little bit mysterious after the Stalin Hitler packed these two dictators are carving up the world together Mysky gets a hint and maybe more than a hint from the British that Germany is going to attack the Soviet Union and he holds back he doesn't tell his bosses in Moscow wasn't that dangerous was it dangerous or was it dangerous to warn Stalin of something that was not going to happen I know it's a bit provocative to put it this way but I've written a whole book on that which is called The Grand Illusion and it deals it's the only book that is based on the Soviet intelligence material for the period before the war and the thing is that both the British despite of Churchill's warning which is it is questionable whether it was a warning I can't get into the details because there was an interest for Britain at that time to get the Russians involved and disengage from Germany so we don't know to what extent the so-called warning of April 1941 was a real warning by the time that the British really shared their enigma information with the Russians was 12 of June by the 12 of June Stalin had become convinced as actually most of the British were that the Germans were not going to attack Russia but that the whole deployment of the troops was in fact an introduction before they sort of putting pressure on the Russian to concede economically and politically parts of the Ukraine, passage to Persia and so on and anyone like Zoge this is well known I mean when Zoge from Tokyo warned him he wrote some words which I cannot repeat in public in Washington DC maybe soon I will be able to do it but anything goes and so Meisky being who he was it was a very delicate thing because on the one hand he knew what Stalin expected to get from expected or believed was a thing and there he had this information which sort of put some question marks on that and so he made the wrong decision of not sharing it now when he wrote his memoirs Meisky was in trouble for it and he didn't get in trouble for that because when the Germans eventually attacked I mean then this is actually great I mean his finest hour because when the Germans attacked Stalin was paralyzed he had no instructions whatsoever and he really forged the Grand Alliance I mean he went to church he spoke to Eden and made sure that the speech the famous speech the church delivered would include things that Moscow wanted to hear and so in fact he became a hero in many ways in Moscow rather than being criticized he wasn't the only one the head of the intelligence community just as well General Golikov and the others as we get closer to the war they do not actually share with Stalin their own impressions and because they know what he actually thinks one more question from me and then we're going to open it up to our friends you had a little bit of a propaganda on the top of your your your power point the word was meddling yes yes I'm sure that you read Barbara Tuckman's wonderful book The Distant Mirror well it was it's a wonderful piece of history about the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages that she uses as a mirror to look at us in our century do you see any resonances or contradictions between that country that no longer exists the USSR and Russia today I fear the question I thought you would not raise it but here it comes well you know the simplest thing would be for me to say well you know I'm a historian I can tell you what happened and you tell me what is going to happen today and tomorrow on the basis we live today in a period where history is no longer a respectful or useful tool and I believe that the only way in fact in understanding what is happening right now is looking at a long delay or continuity particularly when it comes to Russia because Russia more than any other country that we know is basically geopolitically oriented now nowadays everyone uses geopolitics which essentially means international affairs but geopolitics is of course a sort of political ideology which connects the geography into the politics and the Russians had been really consistent and persistent in the execution of the phone policy I would say since the Tsarist period and one of the interesting things that happens actually during the time of diary writing is Stalin's move away from ideology into a continuity with the Tsarist or seeing himself as a Russian Tsar and so on and I think that the same thing happened of course with Russia when Gorbachev was the aberration of it by we don't yet know whether it was naivety or weakness or whatever and then of course coming and the new leadership so looking at the Soviet period as if it didn't exist so this was the zero hour like the Germans you know we start a new you know but the rest of the world didn't do and so they realized it's pretty fast and then they connected of course with Soviet period and the earlier period so answering your question I believe we actually probably share the same view that there is a continuity and the study of history could help many politicians in Washington and elsewhere to devise a better policy. Well we need more historians here in Washington let's open it up we're semi-blinded up here so if somebody do this kind of thing yes sir right there thank you very much my name is Iskander I'm coming from Kazakhstan but at the same time I'm a Ramson fellow in DC I have two brief questions the first question is about how do you rate Mayovsky diplomatic skills from 0 to 10 and 11 and a half okay and the second question is about current state of diplomacy as a practice do we if you take into account the current stage of US relations do we need are we in urgent need of new Mayovskis on the both sides one thing that made me less popular with the Russian embassy in London these days is that a lot of the reviewers said relations between Britain and Russia would have looked very different had we had my ski nowadays in the Russian embassy in London of course I'm a great believer in the power of diplomacy and what I try to show to you and I think I can prove it you know through the three volume in particular I have the single volume but I have three full volumes with all the records what I can prove to a large extent that a good diplomat is worth hundred spies in other words a good diplomat like Mayovsky got by far better information and the information that was needed in Moscow then let's say the work of Burgess and Philippine so on a debt period I'm not talking about the post war period but the debt period because when for instance after the German success in Tobruk it was very important for the Russians to know to what extent the British resilience is powerful or not and he went to Eden just one example went to Eden in the phone office and asked him blankly I mean how do you explain what happened there and Eden said well you know what rather than tell you the whole story here are all the telegrams I received from Okinlet General Okinlet and you read through them now a man like Mayovsky who if you read the book which again I very much recommend you will find out that he could even in three volumes more than this selection he could go into a meeting with Churchill which would last for two hours and produce a verbatim record of it out of his memory later on so if you give him those cypher telegrams he would memorize them and so that would be far more efficient then Philby at that time when photocopy machines were easy or that we had iPhones that we could take photos or whatever so if you wanted to get documents it was like fishing in a huge ocean but Mayovsky could get any information he wanted and from whoever he wanted and when you read through and you see for instance because of the rivalries he knew how to use the rivalries within the British system so for instance there are rivalries even between Eden and Churchill at the beginning of the war allowed him to conspire with Eden you know against Churchill so my answer is yes we still need diplomats despite the age of the new technology there was new technology data microphones were relatively new but nonetheless you needed people like him being able to perform the human task when we have robots as diplomats that would be a different story we have some very good ambassadors here in this audience by the way Gene thanks Gene very interesting is the book so just picking up on your comment about the influence of geopolitics on Russian thinking was Mayovsky a continuation of the Russian tradition or an aberration in that context because you referred to Gorbachev as an aberration yes and if I may another sort of follow-on question what was his influence on Russian diplomacy after he retired when he believed you know a school of thought behind him and students who perhaps followed his footsteps later thank you very much for the questions he was not an aberration he was a continuation and in that respect he belonged to what we call the sort of old school of Russian diplomacy which Chicharin embodied despite the fact that he was the first when he was the second Trotsky was the first but the main first Soviet foreign minister and so he was a Russian so he was thinking in Russian interest he was more a figure of the 19th century than of the product of the Russian Revolution now his impact well I'll give you a simple example in the residency of the present Russian ambassador they kept Mayovsky's room as a kind of inner museum untouched which shows really the impact that he had during that period of course at the time at the time of Stalin all his work was demolition but his school or his thoughts about diplomacy those nine pages that they told you or his diary as well as memoirs and his work at the academy of science so on definitely left a tremendous impact I think on the way the Russians performed diplomatic work thank you very fascinating presentation I'm Rob Tobias and consultant formerly with U.S. Treasury but interested in history too your answer to the prior question I found quite fascinating and with Ambassador Talbot's comment the other ambassadors in the room I hesitate a bit to ask this question but how do you looking at end results how do you qualitatively from a spy would you like to answer that question oh I'm all ears mouth closed it sounds like a spy to me I think it's in the eyes of the beholder to a large extent and so that would be my impression in Britain when the 70 was it in 1971 many 105 and they were all spies so as I said the line is very thin between the two and what is for me what is absolutely fascinating in the diary is not the methods that is using in order to obtain but in fact the collaboration of the people on the ground in Britain who actually provide the information so willingly now would you say that there are traitors then was a traitor was a beaver brook a traitor when he told my ski the inner thoughts of Churchill because he had a row of the Russian issue so the line as I said is very thin between the two but I certainly would tend to think that a good diplomat is the diplomat that tries to get the utmost information he can get of course not using illegal obvious illegal methods and then at the same time which is a rather schizophrenic task befriending of course the people in the country where he is posted Angela who knows history espionage and diplomacy thank you Angela Stan from Georgetown University I'm interested in the fate of the diaries themselves did he try and hide them when he went back to Russia Soviet Union did he sort of give them to someone else how did the authorities get hold of them and did they in fact keep them under lock and key until you saw them it's a bit of a relief because I'm not asked to comment about today so as I said first of all it's amazing that this diary exists because nobody wrote a diary and then you would have thought well maybe somebody wrote a very short of this is a huge huge three volumes you know so it is such an exception so what happened to the diary it went through various phases first of all he wrote it at home at his residency as I said he had been writing and writing novels even before he became ambassador so he learned how to type so part of it is typed and part of it is handwritten as you saw my feeling is many times handwritten he never dictated it was all written by him and it's really amazing that this man was so busy during the day cultivating 500 people in London and really doing his work well for 11 years would come back home you know at night and write sometimes 11 15 pages of this incredible diary also from the literary point of view so in and of course this was this is amazing for a man who was so cautious and a survivor who could not resist because he had been writing the diaries since the age of 5 so the nature of the diary is also very much reflecting that situation on the one hand it's a political diary on the other hand there are these sort of personal things which I think are the things that really interest so it is written for posterity but also his private a very strange combination so in 1941 in December for instance when he went with Eden on the northern on the very dangerous northern convoys to Russia he was afraid as he should have been that they could easily been torpedoed because at that time about third to half of the boats would be sunk of the convoys and he feared that if that happened his wife would then be left with the diary and then obviously they uncovered the people you have to understand that they were uncovered the people like I identify them I know them really by now who were behind his back all the time they would get the diary and then they could use the diary against her or the family and they were a very close couple they had no children and they lived they shared everything so what he did was write a person letter to Stalin saying you probably know that I am writing a diary I think that this diary I am going now on this very dangerous mission in case anything happens to me I would very much like you to have the diary because it can help you in your future negotiations with the British and they left the letter with his wife this only shows you I mean what it meant actually writing of course it came back safely and then we have only the letter which really reflects on the danger when he was arrested when he was arrested all his papers including the diary he brought everything back there is a wonderful description in the book at the end I have a chapter on his return where he accumulated so much in terms of books and written that they had to have a number of trucks actually waiting for them in Egypt and then had this convoy going all the way to Moscow and he was guarding it personally because it was full of all the secrets and so he brought it all to Moscow and when he was arrested everything was of course seized from small microfilm which he kept but that's a different story and I encourage you to read this story so he gave everything when he was released two years later he got back all the papers but not the diary because the diary was considered to be a whole secret which it does and when he wrote his own memoirs which he published in the 60's and 70's they are very misleading because he promised in order to get out of prison he promised Khrushchev's another that if they let him out he would write the book which could serve as a counter measure to the all those provocations in the west about Soviet policy so he wanted to write his memoirs and they gave him one year to go to the archives with pencil and papers and take notes from his own diary for three hours a day and the diary stayed there and although from time to time Russian scholars were allowed to peep here and there on issues that had some sort of political interest it was pretty much forgotten until it was brought to me by sheer coincidence Is it what was going to be published in Russia? it was published the Russians have a law since 1991 when documents were sold to the west which in fact forces any important document has to be published first in Russia before it can be published in the west so I had actually to cater for a publisher to do the work but I didn't want to be on their team when it comes to the commentary because the diary is not the diary only but I spent ten years collecting all archival material from Russia Britain, United States and France and corroborating the entries and yeah Yes sir and then go to the gentleman David Gregorian policy forum Armenia so I can tell an Armenian joke but I would rather ask you a question about the point you made regarding foreign policy understanding if he was in fact pursuing a terrorist foreign policy why would he not encourage any fact he awarded the plans by Marshal Zhukov to invade western Armenia or eastern Turkey following 1945 would anything in my case suggest or shed light on that episode why were those plans and then a second question perhaps for both of you fast forward 80 years you mentioned that you said that if Russia's aspirations today were taken to account better you know I don't want to put words in your mouth but I thought you said that things would have been different things would have been better to what extent really those aspirations should be factored in into western or US policies now that we have independent countries around Russia whose personal interests countries like Georgia, Armenia, Moldova Ukraine yes okay the last question is very much a sort of political question related to today and this really deserves a series of historical discussion on the way that the Cold War ended and the impact that the way that it was that it ended and the way that it was presented the presentation of the end was or believed to be in the West and in Russia and I think that you said aspirations you say aspirations other would say Russian aggressiveness which assumes that there's no limit because when you say aspiration share the word with you because it assumes that there are limits let's say to expansion or that the expansion is dictated by security or other needs and can be satisfied not necessarily by military means but for it is by diplomacy and so let's say in a single word yes the aspirations I believe are pretty much the same they don't necessarily mean that they would necessarily want to control the or be really direct charge of the Ukraine but definitely have influence on the literal of the Black Sea which goes back to the 1878 war and the Crimean war and so on so I say yes there are aspirations but if we think about aspirations and so on and not just use the term aggressiveness which is more emotional you know than Russian then I agree with what you say anybody else yes back there Shaul Bahash George Mason University I happen to have been working in the British archives on the Anglo-Soviet decision in the fall of 1941 to invade Iran yes so as to secure passage for supplies with the hard pressed Russian army and there are a large number of memoranda in Eden's elegant hand of his conversations with mice yes one gets the impression from these memoranda that it is Eden who is in a way making the major decisions or has the upper hand and I'm wondering whether in the diaries miceki gives any suggestion that he is aware he's playing a weak hand against an ally the Russians needed very much if I remember well because old men forget we spend some time together in Tentantonies and Eden said about Iran that there were only two occasions in the Second World War where the allies collaborated as allies I mean that collaborated militarily the first one was a real fast and that was the evacuation of the Soviet miners who were trapped in Spitzbergen on the way to Moomansk it's quite amusing episode which is described by Noel Coward who thought this was a nice opportunity of doing a cruise to the northern sea so they got to the place where the miners were stranded and the Russians had a lot of crates of vodka bottles and the British would not allow them to put them on the boat because there were too many people coming on the boat so the Russians spent about 10 hours of sort of consuming the boat so this is the first occasion of the collaboration the other collaboration was the collaboration which led to in fact the occupation of Iran strangely enough and that reinforces what I've been trying to say throughout on the lines of the 1907 division between Britain and Russia so supposedly to open the supply route which the Russians anyway didn't want because they preferred the northern convoys and there were a lot of debates about the control of the oil and Eden writes in his diary this is our first act of naked aggression now Eden always present this was Eden Eden always present in another way that Maesky presented he present himself as the iron he was the leader he was he really dominated the conversations with Maesky but he read Maesky diaries as well because I read all his telegrams to Moscow as well to get a completely different picture of Eden actually being manipulated all the time by Maesky that would be my short answer there was one other question back there and that will have to be the foot last I'm afraid good evening I am no one I am from New Orleans and due to a lack of my own nation's resources I like to play chess with Russians but given your discussion of history I'd like to ask you how has the editing and unfortunately revision of history affected the telling of this story for the reason we study history is to understand current events better so that we don't repeat the same mistakes how has the editing and revision of these diaries and the lack thereof notable lack thereof affected this story I'm still thinking whether we study history in order to understand today I would say we approach history from the present point of view any sort of thought that we are recreating history as it was objectively is of course wrong in the sense that we always project our present values and views on the period that we are studying so it goes both ways I think one can learn a lot from history but not necessary lessons in the sense that history repeats itself, history doesn't repeat itself but there is an experience historical experience from which we can learn now what we can learn from my ski first and foremost is the power of because I spoke only about the long durée and the legacies but there's another thing the legacies created a very strong emotional streak when it comes to Russia and that's the view of Russia from the west and the view of the west from Russia and I've been studying English-Soviet relations for many years I stopped counting and what is really striking is the extent to which preconceived ideas have become part of our gene because we are doing it unconsciously so we have images the images of Russia I'll give you a very simple and down-to-earth recent example there have been some very strong stormy we had some stormy weather in Europe with snowfalls, severe snowfalls in Britain and it was called the beast from the east the Siberian the Siberian winter so it's the beast Russia the bear and I've got plenty of examples but I'll give you the counter example so this is emotion and I think that preconceived ideas are a terrifically strong and powerful power in the relations between Russia and the west there are many reasons for it we don't have time to get into it but it is also long because it goes from 19th century let me just remind you the term jingoism which is used in British I don't know if it's used in the States as well more and more okay so obviously this used was born during the 1878 war when there was a hysteria about the Russian sort of streaming into a Constantinople when in fact it was a Russian attempt to change the terms of the Crimean war which deprived them access to the literal of the city and in fact they stopped at San Stefano while they could have marched on to Constantinople and dictated to the bridge and then there was hysteria and it created the term jingoism so we have a lot of that in the long history and when I actually started my studies in Oxford I was advised by then Isaiah Berlin who brought me over from Israel there he said the most interesting topic if you want to study Russia is the perceptions of the West of Russia historically so my answer would be what we learn from the diary a lot is really the power of those perception during his conversation with the other people and the other thing is a significant role of personalities because when we dealt with Russia we had a long legacy until the collapse of the Soviet Union of examining Russia only from the ideological prism or thinking in terms of the ideological rivalry and so we didn't look into personalities and the role of personalities and the importance of ambassadors like him and other ambassadors so I would say these are the two most important lessons for me. What a wonderful response I think it was Mark Twain who himself it rhymes and as for the last 90 minutes on a scale of 10 this has been a 12 and a half Thank you very much Thank you