Fitzroy Maclean

“Maclean was one of the great characters of the 20th century. He was a junior diplomat in Moscow in the late 30s and then went on to join the SAS. During the war he kidnapped a Persian general who had collaborated with the Nazis. He was also a friend of Ian Fleming and partly an inspiration for the James Bond character. His account of the Soviet Union in the 30s was quite brilliant. A lot of journalists in those days were making excuses for communism, suggesting it was a hope for the future and were putting the best possible spin on it. But his account showed the whole hopelessness of the Soviet empire – its incompetence and its evilness. He did a brilliant account of the great Stalin purge trials, when most of the leading communists of the day were destroyed by Stalin. That whole bleak period was brilliantly described by Maclean. He showed up the hollowness and incompetence of the whole Soviet system. This is a very carefully worded account of life in those early days after the revolution, one of the first exposés of that system. He tells one particular story when he was a young diplomat. He went to a cocktail party and had a relationship with a young Russian ballet dancer who then disappeared. He had a phone call from her mother saying she’d disappeared and that she’d never forgive him.” Read more...

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Richard Beeston, Foreign Correspondent