Hunger and hypocrisy in post-imperial Leningrad

Sir Reader Bullard is a legend in the Foreign Office - the son of a London docker who joined the Levant Consular Service in 1906 and became a specialist in Arab, Turkish and Persian affairs before ending his career as British ambassador in Tehran. It was there that "Hajji" Bullard first met Joseph Stalin in the flesh, at a dinner during the 1943 conference with Roosevelt and Churchill. "He looks like a benevolent churchwarden, and talks in a slow, soft voice," Bullard recorded of the Soviet leader. With Stalin's real modus operandi, however, Bullard was already thoroughly conversant, thanks above all to his three years as consul general in Leningrad.

Sir Reader Bullard is a legend in the Foreign Office - the son of a London docker who joined the Levant Consular Service in 1906 and became a specialist in Arab, Turkish and Persian affairs before ending his career as British ambassador in Tehran. It was there that "Hajji" Bullard first met Joseph Stalin in the flesh, at a dinner during the 1943 conference with Roosevelt and Churchill. "He looks like a benevolent churchwarden, and talks in a slow, soft voice," Bullard recorded of the Soviet leader. With Stalin's real modus operandi, however, Bullard was already thoroughly conversant, thanks above all to his three years as consul general in Leningrad.

His impressions of that most terrible time have now been published, and they make a stunning portrait. When Bullard arrived in 1931, the city was about to undergo an ordeal surpassed only by the German siege during the Second World War. The Great Famine caused by Stalin's forced collectivisation of agriculture brought mass starvation and drove peasants, in their tens of thousands, from the country, on to the streets of Leningrad. For days, there would be no bread in the shops. Reports of cannibalism abounded. Add to all that the omnipresent OGPU, forerunner of the KGB, with its "hot room" and "cold room" torture chambers. And behind the OGPU lay the shadow of the penal camps on the Arctic Circle.

For Bullard, life was no diplomatic sinecure. His own allowances were cut as Ramsay MacDonald's government faced the crisis of 1931. "Mended about eight pairs of black socks," begins the entry for 29 November. A few weeks later, in his desperation to obtain fuel, he mixes coal dust with snow to produce lumps to get the fire going. Such was the cocktail circuit of post-imperial Leningrad.

Some of the characters in the diaries are straight from Evelyn Waugh. There are his fellow diplomats, with their forlorn private lives and propensity for drink. There is Waldauer, the Latvian-born director of the Hermitage, veering between contempt and despair at the sale of art treasures by a desperate regime; and the interference of ignorant, chattering officials, whom he likens to the Bandar Log, the monkey tribe in The Jungle Book.

Then there is the redoubtable Lady Muriel Paget, moving force behind the Distressed British Subjects in Russia Relief Association. Convinced that the main problem of those poor souls was depression, she tried to cheer them up by appearing in their squalid lodgings, decked out in the latest Paris outfits. Alas, the association's van ended up in the hands of the secret police, who used it to collect the furniture of "counter-revolutionaries" sent to the camps or shot.

Bullard's background gave him an instinctive sympathy with the Soviet experiment. But the worker's son instantly saw through the fiction of the workers' paradise. Nothing upset him more than British visitors burdened by middle-class guilt, convinced that they had seen the socialist future and comforting themselves that the more eggs were broken, the more perfect the social omelette.

Bullard's son Julian, himself a former ambassador in Bonn, and his wife, Margaret, have performed a service for history and literature by editing this remarkable diary. It is an awful mosaic of daily life: the material deprivations, the loss of human dignity, the hypocrisy and evil of a regime built on terror and deceit. Like observers of Russia since the Middle Ages, Bullard is struck by the passivity of the people, which makes them perfect fodder for mendacious despotism.

However, even Russians can stand only so much. "Rations are now so bad that men are running away to the country," Bullard noted. "Last year they were running away from the country. It is simply the human belief that somewhere else must be better." But there were few places on earth more unpleasant than the Soviet Union of the 1930s. By the time Bullard left, in July 1934, the worst of the food crisis had passed; but five months later, Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party boss, was assassinated - and the Great Terror began.