John Maynard (civil servant)
Sir Herbert John Maynard, known as John Maynard, KCIE, CSI (12 July 1865 – 6 December 1943), was a British civil servant in India who also played a leading role in the Fabian Society and wrote about Russia.
He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and St John's College, Oxford, where he won the Stanhope essay prize in 1883 and earned a First in 1886. He joined the Indian Civil Service in 1883, becoming deputy commissioner in 1889 and later councillor to the Raja of Mandi in 1890.
In the early 1890s, Maynard learned Russian through a Government of India program for officers to become interpreters. In 1894 he spent part of his furlough in Russia, living in Moscow with a Russian family and studying the language for six to eight months. He visited Russian Turkestan in 1895, reaching Tashkent, and returned to Moscow for the coronation of Nicholas II. Back in India, he kept up his Russian and read extensively in Russian literature; his letters show a keen interest in peasant life and politics.
From 1896 to 1899 he served as judicial secretary to the government of the Punjab. He later held other high posts: commissioner of excise (1903), commissioner of Multan (1906), commissioner of Rawalpindi (1911), and financial commissioner of the Punjab (1913). He retired in 1927 after many years of distinguished service.
Maynard visited Russia again with his wife in 1933, traveling through Leningrad, Moscow, the Volga region, Stalingrad, Rostov, the Caucasus, Tiflis, Batum and the Black Sea coast, returning via Warsaw and Berlin. He revisited the USSR in 1935 to study the collectivization of farming, then wrote about it in Collective Farming in the U.S.S.R., published in 1936 as part of the School of Slavonic Studies.
His final trip to the USSR was in 1937, when he went from Istanbul to Odessa seeking to study the influence of Byzantine art on Russian art, but the Moscow Trials and suspicion of foreigners limited meetings, leaving him disappointed. He planned to publish a single-volume study of the Russian peasant but was advised to release the portion up to the February Revolution of 1917 first. That part appeared as Russia in Flux in 1940; the rest followed as The Russian Peasant and other Studies in 1942, with subsequent printings in 1942 and 1943.
Maynard was a supporter of the British Labour Party, standing unsuccessfully for Parliament in King's Lynn in 1929, and in Stroud (1931 by-election) and Fulham East (1931 general election). He also served on the executive of the Fabian Society. In 1920 he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 05:06 (CET).