The Politics of Dancing

The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James's, 1932-1943 Edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky Pushkin Press  Stalin’s henchmen, sycophants constantly in fear for their lives, for very obvious reasons tended not to keep diaries or any other documentary evidence of their thoughts and feelings. This makes the discovery of Ivan Maisky’s diaries all the more astonishing. Soviet ambassador to the UK from 1932 to 1943, Maisky was unique in a great number of ways. He not only loved his posting but was extremely fond of the UK, and had many genuine friendships within the British establishment, being particularly close, amongst others, to Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Lloyd George, and George Bernard Shaw. He and Churchill got on well, and there were few in the Foreign Office with whom he did not have an amicable relationship. These years were amongst the most tumultuous in the twentieth century, leading up to the outbreak of a cataclysmic world war which, by 1943 when he was...

Putin History and The Ukraine 'A state whose policymakers nurse grudges against both its enemies and its friends is a dangerous animal, ready to pounce at the first fright or whiff of opportunity. Russia [in 1914] was a country with much to loose, but for which the risks of inaction seemed...to be as great and possibly greater, than those of action. It was a country in other words that would not shrink from going to war to improve her precarious position in a hostile international environment.' From 'The Russian Origins of the First World War,' Sean McMeekin. ‘ The president of ex-Soviet Moldova has warned Russia against any attempt to annex his country’s separatist Transdniestria region in the same way that it has taken control of Crimea in Ukraine. During a trip to Moscow, the speaker of Transdniestria’s separatist parliament, Mikhail Burla, yesterday urged Russia to incorporate his mainly Russian-speaking region, which split away from Moldova in 1990…President...