Ivan Maysky

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In his 1942 portrait of Ivan Maysky, the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka is presumed to have conveyed "a subtle warning against Soviet imperialism" [1].

Ivan Mikhaylovich Maysky (Russian: Ива́н Миха́йлович Ма́йский) (1884–1975) was a Soviet diplomat, historian, and politician, notable as that country's ambassador to London during much of World War II. He is represented on one of the iconic portraits of the 20th century (illustrated, to the right).

Ivan Maysky was born Jan Lachowiecki to a Russified Polish family living in Imperial Russia. Shortly after graduating from the historical faculty of the Moscow university, in 1903 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and then the Menshevik faction. In 1908 he left Russia for western Europe, where he learned English and French. At the outbreak of the Russian Civil War and the revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion in Siberia, Maysky returned to Russia and settled in Samara, where he joined the local communist government, for which he was banished from the Mensheviks.

In 1921, he officially joined the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) which started his career within the communist system of power in Russia. Since 1922 he started working as a diplomat at various posts. In 1927, he became the Soviet embassador to Finland and then to Japan. In 1932 he became the envoy to the United Kingdom, a post he held until 1943. A close collaborator of Maxim Litvinov, Maysky was an active member and the Soviet envoy to the Committee of Non-Intervention during the Spanish Civil War.

After the outbreak of World War II and the Soviet break-up with their former allies, Maysky was responsible for the normalization of relations with the Western Allies. Among other pacts, he signed the Sikorsky-Maysky Agreement of 1941, which allowed for hundreds of thousands of Poles to be released from the Soviet Gulags. In 1943, he was called off to Moscow, where he became the deputy commissar of foreign affairs. As such, he was a member of Soviet delegations to the conferrences in Yalta and Potsdam.

In 1945, he retired from active service in Soviet diplomacy and devoted himself to history. Since 1946 he was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1953, shortly before Stalin's death, he was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison for alleged espionage. In 1955, however, he was released, cleansed of all the charges and fully rehabilitated.