Moscow Diary

Most memoirs by high Communist officials and politicians are disappointingly uninformative or deliberately misleading. Not so this Diary by a former Yugoslav Ambassador to Moscow. The publication, three years ago, of the Serbo-Croat original, reviewed in this country by only a few papers such as The Listener and specialist journals like the Slavonic Review and the Cambridge Historical Journal, proved a best-seller in Yugoslavia but a fresh apple of discord with the Soviet Union. And no wonder, as we can now see from this excellently translated and presented English version. It offers a candid, carefully considered and utterly damning picture of Moscow's attitude towards the client states forming – or, like Yugoslavia, deemed to be straying from – the 'Socialist camp led by the Soviet Union'. It also makes fascinating reading and an invaluable contribution to our knowledge of the Khrushchev period, revealing, as David Floyd observes, 'more clearly than any other account of life at the centre of Soviet power, the way the Soviet leaders really look at the rest of the world, their friends and their enemies, and each other'.