Journey into the past : Soviet Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Member of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. / 1932-1943 [by] Ivan Maisky. Translated from the Russian by Frederick Holt.

Includes an index.

Includes one illustration, a portrait of Ivan Maisky.

Contains 12 appendices (pages 269 - 281) which give further detail into the lives of each of the Russian political émigrés mentioned in Part II.

Part 1. London (1912) / 1. Three arrivals -- 2. In Highgate Cemetery -- 3. The British Museum -- 4. The communist club --

Part II. Russian political émigrés / 5. The Herzen Circle and its members -- 6. M.M. Litvinov -- 7. G.V. Chicherin -- 8. F.A. Rothstein -- 9. A.M. Kollontay -- 10. Petro Zarechny -- 11. F.M. Stepnyak -- 12. P.A. Kropotkin -- 13. A.I. Zundelevich -- 14. P.B. Karpovich -- 15. Lansbury's story -- 16. Sie transit... -- 17. The socialist congress in Coppenhagen --

Part III. Among the English / 18. 'The socialist camp' -- 19. The trades union congress -- 20. Black Towns -- 21. The giant in Chains -- 22. The kidnapping of Sun Yat-Sen--

Part IV. The fall of tsarism and the return to Russia / 23. The February Revolution -- 24. The reactions in England -- 25. The socialist leader -- 26. The struggle with the British government over the return of the émigrés -- 27. Home at last -- 28. End of a journey into the past.

"When Ivan Maisky first arrived in the United Kingdom in 1912, it was as a political refugee, hunted by the Tsarist police, a penniless third-class passenger, unable to show the customs officer the statutory £5 required at that time for entering the country. Twenty years later he was to return as Soviet Ambassador, but in this volume of memoirs he looks back to the London he knew half a century ago, and recalls a world that has disappeared forever, a world, indeed, that few Londoners in those days knew existed in their midst. It was the world of the pre-revolution Russian exiles, bounded by damp, gloomy, lodgings, by the British Museum reading room (with its categories, as defined by the author, of 'casuals', 'nomads', and 'settlers'), by the Communist Club in Charlotte street, where left wing émigrés congregated, and where, the Herzen Circle staged amateur theatricals.The secretary of this artistic and cultural group was M.M. Litvinov, who is one of many famous figures to appear in an unfamiliar role in these pages. The author gives here for the first time Litinov's own story of the 'Russian People's Embassy' which he set up on Victoria street, long before the U.S.S.R. was recognized by the British government. Other émigrés encountered here include the aristocratic G.V. Chicherin, who was to become People's Commisar for Foreign Affairs, F.A. Rothstein, who spent five years at the British Museum working on a counterblast to Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' which he never completed, the anarchist Prince Kropotkin and the diplomat Madame Kollontay (an unforgettable glimpse of her joining in weekend races on Parliament Hill, the Russian colony's favorite playground). But Maisky's contacts were not only with the exiles. A fascinating and critical account of his contacts with the British Labor movement throws unexpected sidelights on such eminent figures as Ramsay Macdonald and George Lansbury. And so to the revolution, the fervor with which it was acclaimed by the exiles, and their desperate effort to return across war torn Europe to a communist Russia..." --from the book jacket

Translated from Russian into English