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Sunday 27 May 2012

Reaching through the Iron Curtain

In the pages of the Kremlin’s secret diary, Pavel Stroilov discovers what Labour’s Soviet sympathisers said when they thought no one was listening

It is almost 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall — and still the truth keeps trickling out of Moscow. The Soviets, like the Nazis, were meticulous note-keepers and there is decades worth of material still to be uncovered. At first, only those who went through the filing cabinets could compile the untold stories of the USSR. But now that these records are being digitised, scrutinising them becomes a lot easier. And this is how I came across the extraordinary diaries of Anatoly Chernyaev.

For years he was the Soviet Union’s contact man with the West. But from the 1970s onwards he met the British politicians who went looking for favours behind the Iron Curtain — and recorded every encounter in his journal. He was a deputy in the Soviet International Department (a successor to the Comintern) and latterly an adviser to Gorbachev himself. His diaries in the Gorbachev era have been translated in Washington. But his liaisons with British politicians in the Cold War era have never been made fully public — until now.

They tell the story of a ‘special relationship’ between the British Labour party and the Soviet Communists — stretching out over decades. They show MPs who thought the USSR posed no strategic threat to their country. They show a reverential approach of the party’s leaders to their Russian ‘comrades’; their identifying of Margaret Thatcher as a common enemy to be ‘beaten’; and their frantic pleading with the regime to provide access to, among others, Brezhnev — but only for the sake of appearances.

These are not the sensationalist, publicity-seeking memoirs of a minor aide. Chernyaev’s authority is unquestionable. Svetlana Savranskaya, Director of Russia Pro-grammes at the US National Security Archive (which holds the diary) describes it as ‘the single most authoritative source on Soviet policy-making in the last 20 years of the Cold War’. They have not come to light before because the pre-1985 entries had never been translated.

Chernyaev himself is now aged 88, living outside of Moscow, and pleased that his diaries from this era are being published. ‘Over here there are very few academics or journalists who are interested in my text,’ he said by telephone. ‘This great period in the history of our country has been crossed out.’ Until now.

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