Стр. 40 - V

Author : A. Yakovenko
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation to the United Kingdom
SUCCESS multiplied by intuition is behind many dis-
coveries. This fully applies to British historian Prof.
Gabriel Gorodetsky who has written numerous scholarly
works including The Precarious Truce: Anglo-Soviet Re-
lations, 1924-1927, Stafford Cripps' Mission to Moscow,
1940-1942, etc.
Recalled from London in 1943, Maisky sent his diaries
to Stalin. According to available information, Stalin
transferred them to Molotov unread who, in his turn,
placed them in the USSR Foreign Policy Archives.
It was Prof. Gorodetsky's lucky chance and he used it. He studied the diaries in depth to discover new
and still unknown facts related to the Soviet foreign policy during World War Two and its sources. The
British professor, the recognized authority in the history of Soviet foreign policies between the wars
and in wartime, was amazed to discover precise comments and straightforward accounts of the events
in which the Soviet ambassador had taken part or which he had witnessed, to say nothing of his excellent
style.
In his book, Gorodetsky has pointed out that Maisky was "a superb 'public relations' man at a time
when the concept hardly existed, he did not shy away from aligning himself with the opposition groups,
backbenchers, newspaper editors, trade unionists, writers, artists, and intellectuals." All and everyone
who closely followed what was going on in the Soviet embassy invariably pointed to the ambassador's
communication skills.
It should be said that some of the British reviewers were unpleasantly surprised and could hardly palate
the openness of British politicians of that time and their contacts with the Soviet ambassador. This
means that history does not tolerate lacunas. Complete and unabridged knowledge would have probably
made it much harder to insist on stereotyped ideas about the Soviet Union/Russia and to push the
world to the Cold War.
Having studied mountains of archival documents, from British and American archives among others,
Prof. Gorodetsky concluded that World War Two could have been prevented if the Western powers
had come to an agreement with the Soviet Union not in July 1941 but two years earlier.
The Maisky Diaries are an inexhaustible source of information that British historians can use when
studying the interwar and war periods. Not infrequently, the Diaries and Maisky's telegrams to Moscow
are the only source of information about his contacts with Churchill and other state and political figures
of the United Kingdom. The Cold War and its ideological imperatives distorted, to a great extent, the
history of Europe's drift toward the catastrophe of World War Two.
The book itself is a shortened variant (it covers only one-fourth of daily entries) of the complete three-
volume edition of The Maisky Diaries that crowned the British historian's fifteen years of studies of
one of the most important testaments of that epoch.
Электронное приложение к журналу «Международная жизнь»
Diplomatic Experience That Never Fades