George F. Kennan: An American Life (15 page)

He arrived in Moscow on January 3, 1934, and Annelise joined him two weeks later. “There is nothing I want to do more dear,” she had replied to him. “I don’t think it will be bad.... As long as we are together I don’t care.” She found George, still a month shy of his thirtieth birthday, the sole responsible representative of the United States of America in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
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They lived, for the moment, in the National Hotel, just off Red Square. With restaurants slow and the food bad, Annelise cooked for George in their room, using a hot plate on a whiskey case behind a screen. Under construction next door was the Mokhovaya, named for the street on which it was located, the building that was to be the temporary embassy chancery. Spaso House, the American ambassador’s future residence, stood on a side street a mile west. Constructed by a wealthy merchant in 1914, it had been seized by the Soviet government, which used it for offices and apartments and was now leasing it to the Americans, along with the Mokhovaya, until a new residence and chancery could be built on a bluff in the Sparrow Hills, overlooking the city. Bullitt had proposed the location—it could be, he argued, a “Monticello in Moscow”—and Josef Stalin agreed at the end of a vodka-fueled Kremlin dinner, sealing the pledge by kissing the astonished ambassador. But the diplomatic climate soon cooled, and the compound never got built. Spaso House and the Mokhovaya were still the principal American facilities in Moscow when Kennan himself became ambassador in 1952.
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Kennan’s job was to negotiate the leases, oversee construction and remodeling, arrange gas and telephone service, and clear shipments of office supplies and furniture through customs so that Bullitt and his staff would have places to live and work. Helping out were a male stenographer, the State Department architect Keith Merrill, and Charles W. Thayer, a young West Point graduate who had shown up in Moscow hoping to acquire Russian and a position in the Foreign Service. Kennan hired him; Thayer found a Harley-Davidson and was soon zooming around town on official business, “the ear tabs of his Russian fur cap flapping wildly in the wind.” This bare-bones establishment operated without codes, safes, security, couriers, or even at first an office. Contrary to Bullitt’s expectations, it had no access to the highest authorities: instead it dealt with a ponderously inefficient bureaucracy, the respective parts of which usually did not connect. “Nevertheless,” Kennan recalled, “I felt that we, with our absence of bureaucracy, accomplished more in a few weeks than did the full embassy staff, when it arrived, over the first year of its existence.”
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“All this had to be done,” George wrote his cousin Charlie James, “in a place which has the world’s craziest financial system,” on behalf of a government—his own—“which has the world’s craziest system of expenditure control.” The State Department provided only minimal instructions, so Kennan meticulously documented every meeting, phone call, and disbursement of funds. He was attempting to master Soviet laws on insurance—such as they were—translating tortuously worded contracts, juggling the intricacies of currency exchange, assigning space in the still-uncompleted Mokhovaya, urging the eviction of Spaso’s recalcitrant tenants, even bargaining on hotel rates for the incoming staff. The manager of the National agreed with Kennan that any Western European establishment would happily give official Americans a 25 percent discount, but that was because “the capitalist world had an economic crisis and Soviet Russia did not.”

Kennan was also becoming an expert on menu planning, interior decorating, trade promotion, tourism, emigration, marriage counseling, and mortuary science. He spent hours one day trying to explain the concept of a “quick lunch” to the kitchen staff at the Savoy Hotel, where the Americans had relocated because the National would not budge on its room rates: he could provide recipes for “light, simple dishes,” to be prepared “at very low cost.” With his assistants, Kennan was measuring the rooms in Spaso House for rugs and draperies, while trying to meet the demands of Americans already in the Soviet Union who had hitherto lacked an embassy to which to turn: there were export-hungry businessmen, tourists with lost passports, requests for help with exit visas, questions about divorce proceedings, and in one instance the dilemma of whether to disinter and photograph a corpse in Chelyabinsk in order to persuade its widow in Wisconsin that it indeed had expired.

On the night before Bullitt’s return, it fell to Kennan, Thayer, and Merrill to wrestle the ambassador’s bed up the grand staircase at Spaso. They also had to tell him that, for several more months until the Mokhovaya was ready, his residence would double as the embassy chancery. Bullitt was “steaming with fury.” There were evenings, Kennan remembered, when he and the other official Americans in Moscow, “assembled in my hotel room, gloomily sipping our highballs and watching the mice play hide-and-seek along the base-boards,” were on the verge of admitting defeat, fearing that they would soon have to “give it up and sneak shame-facedly away, the laughing-stock of Europe.”
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“The honeymoon atmosphere had evaporated completely,” Bullitt reported to Roosevelt a few weeks after his arrival back in Moscow on March 7. The Soviets’ hostility toward all capitalist countries, muffled during the negotiations leading to recognition, was now coming out. The only way to deal with them would be to offer carrots but to make it clear that if these were refused, “they will receive the club on the behind.” The embassy staff was the only “bright spot in the murky sky. . . . I am delighted with every man.”
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They were impressive. Loy Henderson, who went with Bullitt to Moscow as second secretary, understood that he wanted “dash, brilliance, imagination and enthusiasm,” and this he got. For in addition to Kennan and Henderson, the embassy now had three other Foreign Service officers whose careers would shape Soviet-American relations well into the Cold War. One was Elbridge Durbrow, who followed Soviet economic affairs and would serve with Kennan again in Moscow during the mid-1940s. A second was Bertel E. Kuniholm, a Kelley protégé who had studied Russian in Paris, and would later report on Soviet activities in Iran. A third, Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen, also trained with Kelley, became Kennan’s closest colleague, and would succeed him as ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1953. “In numberless verbal encounters, then and over ensuing decades,” Kennan recalled, “our agreements and differences would be sternly and ruthlessly talked out, sometimes with a heat so white that casual bystanders would conclude we had broken for life.” But “no friendship has ever meant more to me than his.”
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Those debates started in Moscow, and Annelise witnessed them. Because of the housing shortage, Bullitt had initially prohibited wives from accompanying his staff, but she was already there and in much demand. She found the life exhilarating : “We were young, and gay; we danced all night; but we would also talk all night.” Like the other Americans, the Kennans now had a room at the Savoy, where almost everyone was cooking on the hot plates Annelise had pioneered—when the electricity worked. Telephones functioned erratically, often with only labored breathing at the other end. Owing to ill-conceived State Department economy measures, there was no embassy automobile, so Intourist provided chauffeured Lincolns at rates that Kennan believed soon would have paid for one. With taxis scarce, the only alternative was motorcycles: Annelise recalled riding to one dinner in the sidecar dressed in a long formal gown, while George, in white tie, hung on precariously behind the driver. But the other embassies threw great parties, and as Durbrow recalled decades later: “You made better and closer friends in Moscow than any post I’ve ever heard about or been in.”
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There were also opportunities for George—within the limits the secret police allowed—to begin to feel himself Russian. “Just to ride on a street-car, if you can understand the conversation, is an experience,” he wrote Jeanette. One Sunday in May, with summer having suddenly arrived, the Kennans and several friends picnicked as close as they could get to Stalin’s dacha. “[W]e did not see the big boy,” but skirting the walls of his estate, they found a bluff overlooking the Moscow River filled with families making themselves at home, “with all the delightful informality which is the charm of the Russian countryside.” Security men appeared, “asked where we ‘citizens’ might be from and what we were doing there, and subsided from view just as abruptly upon learning that we were not ‘citizens’ at all, but only a bunch of bourgeois from the American Embassy.”
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From such daytime excursions and late-night discussions, Kennan gained some preliminary impressions of the Soviet experiment. He expressed these most clearly in a handwritten letter, sent by diplomatic courier, for his sister’s eyes only:

“I realize,” George admitted, “that no revolution is entirely discriminate, or ever could be, but it could, at least, make its aim an intelligent discrimination.” He would prefer one that “would raise the best elements of society—and not the worst—out of the futility and tragedy which unfortunately surrounds their existence. And this is the sort of revolution which Moscow has not got to offer!”
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Meanwhile Bullitt was worrying about the physical toll Moscow life was taking on his staff. There was, he advised the State Department, a form of acute indigestion, caused by the excessive use of canned food, that mimicked the symptoms of angina pectoris. One of his subordinates had already suffered such an attack. Russian cuisine was no solution, for even when “obtained at great expense in the best hotels, [it] produces digestive upsets dignified by purple blotches.” If his young men were to stay healthy, they would need more frequent leaves than the department normally provided.
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The afflicted staff member was Kennan, who had been on duty in Moscow longer than anyone else. Leave was accordingly granted, allowing George a few days in Leningrad for the first time, while Annelise remained behind to set up the Mokhovaya apartment, into which they were finally now able to move. Peter the Great’s capital, George wrote Jeanette, had been erected atop the poverty and suffering that Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov had described, “like a flower on a manure-heap.” The Bolsheviks had made no effort to clean up the mess. One of the unhealthiest in the world, the city should never have been built and would perhaps one day sink back into the swamp from which Peter had raised it.

George went on from Leningrad to Norway, where Annelise was to join him. As the mail boat from Oslo approached Kristiansand, having called at each small, freshly painted town along the way, he felt the contrast between Soviet and Scandinavian life that would always move him: “It is wonderful to see the young people all out here on vacation, clean and tanned and so strong and well-built as to put our own younger generation to shame.” Soon “we will pass the island where the Sørensen family have their summer house, and some of the family will probably stand on the rocks and wave handkerchiefs and my little daughter will stare solemnly at the white boat and wonder what it’s all about.... [W]hen she finally sees me, I’m sure she’ll draw a wry face and clutch her grandmother’s skirts for protection.”
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Kristiansand provided protection for George as well. It reunited his family: he had not seen Grace since leaving for the United States the previous September. She was, he wrote Bullitt, “so absurdly healthy” that he hated to take her away from “this paradise of cleanliness, order, and well-fed respectability.” His own health had improved: “I feel perfectly well again now.” And he had bought a seagoing sailboat. The experienced Norwegians, he added in a letter to Charlie James, had been “waiting for me to turn turtle in one of their numerous local squalls or bust up on one of their numerous local reefs.” But he had come through the first four weeks without incident: “I regard my responsibility as a matter of national prestige.”
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George would still be sailing Norwegian waters well into his eighties. In the summer of 1934, though, he was developing a higher ambition: he wanted to become a writer. The Kennan children had grown up in a house filled with books. George and Jeanette shared poems with each other and later a passion for novels. Reading good fiction, he had written her from Riga the year before, “leaves me tingling with excitement and dissatisfaction.” Lives throb with beauty and pathos, and “I am instinctively certain that if my poor intelligence was put into the world for any purpose, it was to act as a reflector and magnifier . . . to drag it out of the corners where it lurks and flash it to a world which sees too little of it.”

The key to the greatness of novelists, though, had always been their limitations: “They knew one thing—one country, at the most—and were saturated with it.” George envied Chekhov his ignorance of all but Russia, Hemingway his war and its relics, Sinclair Lewis his American Midwest.