Publisher's Synopsis
The appointment of Sir Stafford Cripps as the British Ambassador in Moscow in May 1940 has puzzled both contemporaries and historians.
A militant left-winger, Cripps was expelled from the Labour Party in June 1939 for advocating a united front against fascism. In 1942 he returned from Moscow, resting on the laurels of the Russian resistance, and received a seat in the War Cabinet. While Bevin and Attlee elaborated the future social policies of the Labour Government, Cripps laid the foundation for Labour's postwar foreign policy.
This diary and papers reveal his visionary ideas, tempered by a sharply realistic approach deriving from his long career as one of Britain's leading lawyers, and follow his political transformation. The documents selected and annotated by Sir Maurice Shock, Cripps' official biographer, and Gabriel Gorodetsky, the author of Cripps' Mission to Moscow, include a diary, meticulously kept by Cripps while in Moscow and published here for the first time; letters to his daughters; his correspondence with his trusted friend in London, Sir Walter Monckton; and excerpts from the diary of his wife, Lady Cripps. Additional documents used are derived from the papers of Eden, Churchill, and the Foreign Office, as well as recently declassified documents from the archives of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
