Tea and Diplomacy
SHULMAN, MARSHALL D.
Tea and Diplomacy the kremlin and the embassy By Sir William Hayter Macmillan. 160 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by marshall d. shulman Professor of International Politics, Fletcher School of Law and...
...Long after the resignation of Malenkov, Sir William confesses, he held to the wishful prediction that the former Premier would again be the coming man in Soviet politics...
...Of Zhukov: "His rapid rise made some foreign observers talk of Soviet Bonapartism, but given the structure of Soviet society the most he could ever have aspired to was to be a Soviet Eisenhower...
...Bitterly, he counts among the costs of this folly an encouragement of the second wave of Soviet repression in Hungary...
...It makes no pretensions to depth of analysis or new relevations, but its observant impressions of the Soviet Union and its leadership will be diverting to the general reader and will offer interesting sidelights to the specialist...
...Sir William Hayter, a professional diplomat, now the Warden of New College, Oxford, has written a cultivated and urbane account of his tour of duty...
...His quiet, dignified dissociation from an action repug- nant to his conscience is characteristic of the high sense of public duty and private responsibility which marks the career of this man, and distinguishes his memoirs...
...Of Malenkov, Sir William writes: "There was something creepy about his appearance, like a eunuch, though he could produce a charming smile...
...He was a real believer...
...on the other hand, an underestimation of the policy conflict regarding the supremacy of heavy industry, and, in common with other diplomatic observers, an overestimation of the durability of the Khrushchev-Malenkov "collective leadership...
...Some quick sketches of leading Soviet personalities reflect wit and an observant eye...
...Of Gromyko: "a highly efficient official by any standards, lucid, hard-working, by Soviet standards straightforward and with a prodigious memory...
...The crisp professionalism of Sir William's observations is complemented by the astringency of his judgments...
...With impartial honesty, he records successes and failures from his despatches of the time: a prescience back in 1953 of the potential strains in the Sino-Soviet alliance...
...Of Molotov: "superficially a little ridiculous, with his stammer and his pince-nez...
...The book has honesty and grace...
...sly...
...Following Khrushchev's disastrous encounters with the Labor party during his visit to England in April 1965, he is quoted as saying to Sir William: "Bulganin can vote Labor if he likes but I'm going to vote Conservative...
...The substantive climax of the book centers on Sir William's blunt condemnation of British policy in the Suez episode, on both moral and practical grounds...
...Khrushchev, I said, was like one of those peasants raised to the nth power...
...He records the rocket-rattling threats which he was obliged to transmit from Moscow to London, together with the impression that the Russians made the threats only when they could safely assume the British reversal to be inevitable...
...Reviewed by marshall d. shulman Professor of International Politics, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy This is a brief and engaging book by the British Ambassador to the Soviet Union during the interesting period from late 1953 until the beginning of 1957...
...shrewd, suspicious, cautious under an appearance of abandon, fundamentally contemptuous of the barin, the master...
...Illustrative of his ability to convey much with a few sure strokes is this account of dinner with his former philosophy tutor at Oxford on his return from the Soviet Union in the '30s: "I was airing my famous open mind to him when he asked me: 'Is there a rule of law there?' On reflection I saw that this was the right question and that the unquestionably correct negative answer told one nearly all one needed to know of Stalin's Russia...
...To make Khrushchev real to people in London, Sir William likened him to "the typical Russian peasant as he appears in the classical Russian novels of the nineteenth century...
...Moreover, to say a rather old-fashioned thing, he had the instincts of a gentleman...
...On Soviet foreign policy in the '50s, Sir William cites his efforts to counterbalance undue expectations in London that summit conversations with Stalin's successors could deflect the Soviet Union from its persistent aims...
...Yet with all this he was in many ways rather a formidable figure...
...Sir William's indignation also entered into his decision to leave the service of the Foreign Office at the age of 50...
...Indeed, as he records, he has had the best of it: once as a carefree bachelor secretary and once as an Ambassador "luxuriously installed in an Embassy with plenty of people to look after you...
...in different circumstances it would have been possible for us to have had a real friendship with Gromyko and his nice wife...
...Ignore by all means Sir William's advice to impatient readers to skip the accounts of his travels to Central Asia and the Caucasus, for these are among the most delightful pages of this little volume...
...In his travels and in his political observations, Sir William has the advantage of being able to draw upon his previous tour of duty in the Soviet Union as a young diplomat during the '30s...
...Curiosity and a love of travel win out over an unathletic disposition in the best tradition of English travel literature, and Sir William pokes into remote vales with a dry eye for the tawdry and a moving susceptibility to beauty and to the mysterious marks of receding history...
Vol. 50 • May 1967 • No. 11
