Prof. Gabriel Gorodetsky, a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and emeritus professor of history at Tel Aviv University, has just published the Turkish edition of his commented selection of the diaries kept by Ivan Maisky during his time as Russian ambassador to London from 1932 to 1943.
As the only Russian diplomat among those with close connections to Stalin’s inner circle at that time, Maisky kept a detailed, sharp witted and insightful diary of his life in London during the Second World War.
The Turkish edition of the dairies is a special one edited by Prof. Gorodetsky especially for the Turkish audience. It contains, as Prof. Gorodetsky puts it, “a lot of material which hasn’t been dealt with by the historians regarding Turkish diplomacy at the time, like the lengthy conversations which Maisky had with Tevfik Rüştü Aras”, the ambassador of Turkey to the United Kingdom between 1939-1942.