Stafford Cripps in Moscow, 1940-1942: Diaries and Papers (review)

Gabriel Gorodetsky has usefully edited the diaries and correspondence of Stafford Cripps from the period of his service as Great Britain's ambassador to the Soviet Union, February 1940 to January 1942. Entries from the diaries and correspondence of Cripps's friends and relatives and other officials supplement the material from Cripps's own papers. Of especial interest in the supplementary material are a number of entries from the diary of the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maiskii, which Gorodetsky is now preparing for publication. They suggest that Maiskii was a more interesting and objective observer than one would suppose from his familiar memoirs, which too obviously bear the impress of official censorship.

In his introduction Gorodetsky offers a thoughtful and generally persuasive interpretation of Cripps both as a man and as a diplomat. He observes that Cripps, who once played so large a part in British politics, sank into comparative oblivion after his premature death in 1952 and has only latterly been rescued by the interest of several scholars. Gorodetsky proposes a number of reasons for the descent of Cripps's reputation, but perhaps none has been more influential than his "reputation as a gullible fellow-traveler of Stalinism" (p. 1). What emerges very clearly from the pages of this volume is that this characterization is wide of the mark. Cripps was in some ways far more clear-eyed in his appraisals of the Soviet Union than were many British and U.S. officials of his day who have enjoyed a greater reputation for realism than he. (The overrated Winston Churchill deserves pride of place on this list.) Cripps, to be sure, was a man of the left, albeit of an uncommon sort. He was a wealthy aristocrat of ancient lineage, patriotic, and devoutly religious. But his beliefs about the nature and direction of contemporary events nonetheless tended to resemble those fashionable among radicals and "progressives" of the day. Cripps held that the war was a byproduct of capitalism and imperialism, British imperialism not least: "'Capitalism," he wrote, inevitably drifts towards war: economic nationalism as the precursor of economic rivalries [is] the root cause of war.'" In a conversation with Andrei Vyshinskii, Cripps readily agreed that the conflicts of World War II, unlike those of the previous one, were "of class and not of any political rivalries." Cripps saw the appeasement of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as an effort to divert Adolf Hitler to the east in order to preserve British imperialism (pp. 7-9). Cripps himself was a doughty proponent of the Popular Front, which he saw as a means of checking Hitler and of promoting social change. For that the Labour Party expelled him from its ranks in 1939. He was somewhat ambivalent toward the war that began shortly thereafter. Although he was aware of its horrors, he permitted himself to believe that "when, in centuries to come, people look back at this period we have lived through, they will regard it a creative and formative period more than as a period of decay. In the proper perspective of history it is the flower of new growth that will stand out more strongly than the dead foliage of the old plans that have been killed" (p. 43). He was confident that a "revolutionary situation" would develop in Europe after the war (p. 70). Cripps was even prepared to admit in September 1940 that the USSR's rapprochement with Germany was in a sense natural because "they are both making an attempt to get away from our effete civilization which the countries we represent are trying desperately hard to cling to and to revitalize" (p. 69). Needless to say, Cripps believed that capitalism was justly doomed to be replaced by a "new world" (p. 145).

In these ways, and others too, Cripps largely conformed to the view held of him by his critics. He had an understanding of the harshness of Iosif Stalin's rule but saw extenuating grounds for actions "excessively cruel by our...