Ivan Michailowitsch Maiski

Grave sculpture of Maisky in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow

Ivan Maisky (also Majski ; Russian Иван Михайлович Майский , born January 7 ^{. Jul} / 19th January  1884 ^greg. In Kirillov , Russian Empire ; † 3. September 1975 in Moscow ) was a Soviet politician, diplomat and historian.

Life

Maiski was born as the son of assimilated Polish Jews under the name Jan Lachowiecki. His father was a military doctor and his mother a village school teacher.

Exile, exile, revolution, the beginnings of a diplomatic career

Maiski studied history at St. Petersburg University until he was expelled in 1902 for revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia. In 1903 he joined the exile of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party , in which he joined the wing of the Mensheviks . In the revolution of 1905 he belonged to the Soviets of Samara and Saratov , before he was arrested and exiled again. In 1908 he managed to escape to Switzerland, from where he later traveled to Germany and in 1912 obtained a degree in economics from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . He then went to London, where he became acquainted with Lenin , Stalin , Chicherin and Litvinov , among others . In exile he learned French and English.

After the February Revolution of 1917 , like many other emigrants, he returned to Russia and became an employee of the Petrograd Soviet . At the Extraordinary Congress of the Mensheviks in 1917 he was elected to their Central Committee and appointed to head the Ministry of Labor in the Kerensky Cabinet . In 1918, at the beginning of the Russian Civil War , he was sent to Samara by the Central Committee to establish contact with the provisional Komutsch government of the Socialist Revolutionaries .

Maiski with the Finnish Foreign Minister Aarno Yrjö-Koskinen signing the non-aggression treaty, January 1932

After his final break with the Mensheviks, Maiski joined the Communist Party in 1921 and had worked in the Foreign Commissariat since 1922. In 1923 he published an "accounting" with Menshevism under the title "Democratic Counterrevolution". In 1924 he became the first editor of the Petersburg literary magazine Zvezda . On behalf of Lenin he played a key role in the establishment of the Mongolian People's Republic in November 1924. From 1925 to 1929 he was Deputy Ambassador to London and from 1929 to 1932 Ambassador to Finland , where he signed the Soviet-Finnish Non-Aggression Treaty in early 1932 .

In October 1932, shortly before moving to London, he held two talks with the Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov (1876–1951). They are reproduced in detail in the “Memoirs”. Litvinov's analyzes formed the guideline for Maiski's mission and for his diaries. From both points of view, there was no serious conflict of interests between the USSR and Great Britain at that time, in all conflicts and frictions. On the other hand, according to Litvinov, is the hatred of the British bourgeoisie for the October Revolution : “There are two main groups in the British ruling class: one is for reasons of state, and it considers it more advantageous to cooperate with the USSR; in the other the class principle dominates, and she considers it absolutely necessary to attack the USSR at every opportunity that presents itself. ”Depending on the circumstances, one side or the other would gain the upper hand.

In the second conversation Litvinov dealt with the situation in Germany, with which Moscow had the best relations in the West. The Weimar Republic is apparently on its last legs, if Hitler comes to power, Germany becomes the enemy. It is therefore in the interests of a peace policy to improve relations with France and, above all, with England. If the Nazis were in power, both countries would have to look for allies and would be forced to remember the Entente of World War I, including Russia. Maiski's task is to work on this rapprochement. The good relations with Labor politicians, many of whom he knew from his exile in England between 1912 and 1917, should be maintained, as well as contacts with some liberals. But there are no such things as the conservatives, the really rulers. Litvinov: "It will therefore be your most noble and most important task to cut a breach in the wall of ice that separates our London embassy from the Conservatives and to establish the most extensive and lasting contacts possible with the Conservatives."

Ambassador to London

At the end of 1932 he took over the post of ambassador in London from Grigori Sokolnikow , which he would stay for the next eleven years. He played an important role in overcoming British resistance to the accession of the Soviet Union to the League of Nations . From 1936 to 1939 he was the Soviet representative on the Non-Interference Committee established during the Spanish Civil War . At times he also represented his country in the League of Nations. He was a supporter of Litvinov's course of collective security , i.e. an alliance with the Western powers against Germany, and thus belonged to the faction of those who opposed Soviet participation in the Spanish Civil War.

Maiski commented on the British-French ultimatum of September 21, 1938 to Czechoslovakia to give in to Hitler: “The wickedness of the British and French knows no borders!” After the Munich Agreement on the annexation of the so-called Sudetenland on September 29, 1938, he noted : "With one jolt, quantity turned into quality and the world suddenly changed." Moscow's proposals for a system of collective security had finally thrown off France and Great Britain with Munich. That was the preliminary stage to the German-Soviet non-aggression pact a year later.

Maiski has been involved in establishing relationships with leading Zionists such as Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion as well as the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine Isaak HaLevy Herzog since 1939 .

Maiski had a hard time in London after the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939. He had to justify the subjugation of the Estonians , Latvians and Lithuanians by the Soviet Union and the Soviet attack on Finland . He had nothing but malice for the defeated Poles. He tried to “sell” Stalin's collaboration with Hitler, which he had previously warned against. In mid-June 1941, when British newspapers were already reporting on the deployment of the Wehrmacht in front of the Soviet Union border, Maiski assured Anthony Eden that Hitler would not attack. A few days later, after the start of the German-Soviet War in June 1941, Maiski signed an agreement on military cooperation with Great Britain at the beginning of July, which was followed by a military alliance in 1942, and in August the Sikorski Maiski with the head of the Polish government in exile, Władysław Sikorski Agreement in which the Kremlin gave up its September 1939 position that the Polish state no longer existed and the resumption of diplomatic relations was agreed. After the Katyn massacre was uncovered in March 1943 and diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile were broken off, he and Litvinov, the ambassador in Washington, were summoned to Moscow for consultations. Maiski's presence while passing through Gibraltar in the fatal Sikorski plane crash in July 1943 is viewed by some historians as evidence of Soviet authorship of the crash. A little later, in August 1943, he and Litvinov were recalled from their ambassadorial posts. Maiski was sent to the uninfluenced post of "Deputy Foreign Minister".

Apologist of terror, victim of the NKVD, rehabilitation

Although - or precisely because - he himself was in danger, he justified the terror ordered by Stalin . In 1943 the NKVD secret police collected incriminating material against Maiski. Her job was to convict him of being a British spy. He was personally recruited by British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, it said in the secret files that were published in the 1990s. However, no proceedings were opened against Maiski. Instead, he served as Deputy Foreign Minister from 1943 to 1946, and in this role he was involved in drawing up the Soviet plans for shaping the post-war order. In 1945 he took part in the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. Then he retired from the diplomatic service and became a member of the Academy of Sciences .

As part of Stalin's last major anti-Semitic campaign, Maiski was arrested shortly before his death in February 1953. During interrogations at the Lubyanka Secret Service Center , he confessed that he had passed on secret material to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill through his wife . His interest in English culture and his Anglophile way of life were also cited as evidence of his guilt. The head of the secret service Lavrenti Beria personally beat him during interrogation, Maiski later reported in private. But Beria of all people had him brought in shortly after Stalin's death, offered him high offices and released him. As an alleged partisan of Beria, Maiski was arrested again in July 1953 after his disempowerment. His petitions to the party secretary Nikita Khrushchev , the chairman of the Supreme Soviet Kliment Voroshilov and the new public prosecutor of the USSR Roman Rudenko initially remained unanswered. To justify himself, he wrote his memoirs. In it he points out that Soviet foreign policy was completely justified in both moral and political terms. He hides sensitive points. Nonetheless, his memoirs were censored . (Even from the last version published in 1971, 15 years after the start of “ de-Stalinization ”, he had to delete passages critical of Stalin.) He also wrote a novel during his detention called Blizko – Daleko (“Nah und weit weg ").

In a secret trial, the public prosecutor accused Maiski of espionage for Great Britain and of Anglophilia . On June 14, 1955, he was sentenced to six years in exile , but pardoned just eight days later. In 1960 he was formally rehabilitated.

Maiski was a bearer of the Lenin Order . In 1966 he signed a letter from 25 scientists, writers and artists against the rehabilitation of Stalin, addressed to Leonid Brezhnev . In 1971 his memoirs of a Soviet diplomat appeared , but they were severely cut by the censors . The full edition was only published after the collapse of the Soviet Union .

Maiski's diaries

In 1993 the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky came across the more than 1,800-page diary in the archives of the Russian Foreign Ministry that Maiski kept as ambassador in London from 1934 to 1943. In it he reflects conversations with numerous politicians, including David Lloyd George , Ramsay MacDonald , Stanley Baldwin , Neville Chamberlain , Winston Churchill , Anthony Eden, Viscount Halifax , Max Aitken , Clement Attlee , Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb , Stafford Cripps and Robert Vansittart . The diaries are an important source for the history of British-Soviet relations before and during World War II. They were edited from 2006 to 2009 by the Russian historians Alexander Oganowitsch Tschubarian and Vitali Jurewitsch Afiani. A selection comprising about a quarter of the diaries was published in English translation, with extensive comments by Gabriel Gorodetsky.

Representation in art

In 1938 the sculptor Jacob Epstein designed a portrait of Maiski's head (22 × 18 × 23 cm³; Jerusalem, Israel Museum ). A painting by Oskar Kokoschka from 1942 shows Maiski as ambassador in London.

Publications

• Before the storm - memories of childhood and adolescence. Culture and progress, Berlin 1950.
• Modern history of Spain 1808–1917. Translated from the Russian by Hans Piazza . Edited by Manfred Kossok . Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1961.
• Journey into the Past. Hutchinson, London 1962.
• Who helped Hitler? From the memories of a Soviet diplomat. Progress, Moscow 1964 (on the alleged British support for the National Socialists before the Second World War).
• Spanish notebooks. Hutchinson, London 1966.
• Memoirs of a Soviet Ambassador. Dietz, Berlin 1967 (on his time as ambassador to Great Britain, on the prehistory to the Second World War).
• The drama of Munich. APN, Moscow 1972.

Posthumous editions of the diaries

• Dnevnik diplomata, London 1934–1943 . Edited by Alexander Oganowitsch Tschubarian and Vitali Jurewitsch Afiani. Isdatestwo Nauka, Moscow 2006–2009, ISBN 5-02-034011-1 :
  • Vol. 1: 1934 - September 3, 1939 . 2006.
  • Vol. 2, Part 1: September 4, 1939 - June 21, 1941 . 2009.
  • Vol. 2, Part 2: June 22, 1941 - 1942 . 2009.
• Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.): The Maisky Diaries. Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James's 1932-1943 . Yale University Press, New Haven 2015, ISBN 978-0-300-18067-1 (translation of excerpts from the diaries into English); as a paperback under the title The Maisky Diaries. The wartime revelations of Stalin's ambassador in London . Yale University Press, New Haven 2016, ISBN 978-0-300-22170-1 .
  • Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.): The Maiski Diaries. A diplomat in the fight against Hitler 1932–1943 . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-406-68936-9 (translation from English).

literature

• Arkadi Waksberg : The Persecuted Stalin. From the KGB dungeons . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, ISBN 3-499-19633-6 , pp. 67-84.
• Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.): The Maiski Diaries. A diplomat in the fight against Hitler 1932–1943 . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2016; therein the chapter The career of a Soviet diplomat , pp. 32–60.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, p. 80.
2. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, p. 67.
3. ↑ https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/trotzki/1935/02/anmerkun.htm#n12
4. ^ Arnold Schölzel : class hatred or reasons of state, young world, March 23, 2017, supplement, p. 14.
5. ↑ Laurent Rucker: Moscow's Surprise: The Soviet-Israeli Alliance of 1947–1949 (PDF; 560 KB) at wilsoncenter.org , accessed on March 4, 2020.
6. ↑ ^{a b} Jürgen Zarusky : The Networker. Ivan Maiski was Stalin's ambassador to London. Between 1932 and 1943 he worked tirelessly on a British-Soviet rapprochement. And he wrote a diary . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 4th, p. 15.
7. ↑ Rainer Blasius : The devil's ambassador. From 1932 to 1943, Iwan Maiski saw five prime ministers and three kings in London, and met with great writers such as George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 20, 2016, p. 8.
8. ↑ Did British double agent Kim Philby murder Polish was hero General Sikorski? , The Telegraph , July 1, 2008, accessed December 18, 2010; see also: Tadeusz Kisielewski: Po zamachu. Poznań 2012.
9. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, pp. 72-74.
10. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, pp. 76-79.
11. ↑ Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.): The Maiski diaries . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2016, p. 9.
12. ↑ Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.): The Maiski diaries . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2016, p. 17.
13. ↑ Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.): The Maiski diaries . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2016, p. 18.
14. ↑ Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.): The Maiski diaries . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2016, p. 14.
15. ^ Arkadi Waksberg: The persecuted of Stalin. From the KGB dungeons. Reinbek 1993, p. 84.
16. ↑ Text of the letter Письмо деятелей науки и культуры против реабилитации Сталина
17. ↑ Memuary sovetskogo diplomata 1925-1945 gg.
18. ↑ Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.): The Maiski diaries . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2016, p. 8.
19. ↑ Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.): The Maiski diaries . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2016, p. 15.

Web links

Commons : Ivan Maisky  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Iwan Michailowitsch Maiski in the catalog of the German National Library
• The Diary of Ivan Maisky Soviet Ambassador in London, 1934-1943 , at the Cumming Center
• Newspaper article about Iwan Michailowitsch Maiski in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .