George F. Kennan: An American Life (33 page)

Roosevelt quickly made it clear, though, that he did not wish to alter his Soviet policy in the light of the Warsaw Uprising, and Harriman followed his lead: “We had to fight the war. Hitler was our main enemy. We shouldn’t let divergence interfere with that.” Kennan, angrier now, suggested that an international force administer postwar Poland. If that were not possible, then the United States should abandon its interests there altogether rather than “to try to defend them in circumstances over which we will have no real influence.” Harriman wrote back bluntly: “George—These are two extremes, and much ‘too extreme.’ ”

“I didn’t blame Averell for it,” Kennan recalled. “Averell was the President’s personal representative, and he couldn’t join me in these criticisms.” Isaiah Berlin, who knew both men well, explained that Harriman believed in negotiation, “whereas George believed in principle. Those two things could never quite be reconciled. There was no open hostility or tension between them that I know of. But they were very different.” Harriman remembered respecting Kennan’s judgments: “They were accurate but sometimes too impractical to be acted upon.” When he disagreed with Kennan, though, “I simply didn’t bother to waste the time to argue. It didn’t amuse me to do so.”
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While the Polish crisis was developing that summer, Kennan composed a long essay—the final version came to about twelve thousand words—in which he sought to compress what he knew about Russia generally, and Stalin’s Russia in particular. He submitted it, with some diffidence, to Harriman’s aide: “The Ambassador may want to glance over it. I doubt that he would care to read the whole thing. It is just what he would call ‘batting out flies.’” But Kennan’s hopes for the paper were higher than that: “Conscience forced me . . . to make this statement at least available to whose who had responsibility for the formulation of American policy. It would be up to them, then, to draw the logical conclusions, if by chance they should be interested.”
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Entitled “Russia—Seven Years Later,” the essay began by pointing out that the residents of a country, like sailors at sea, had little perception of the currents upon which they were floating. “This is why it is sometimes easier for someone who leaves and returns to estimate the speed and direction of movement, to seize and fix the subtleties of trend.” Kennan had used this argument to justify writing about the United States after visiting it—even if briefly—from abroad. It was also why “no foreign observer should ever be asked to spend more than a year in Russia without going out into the outside world for the recovery of perspective.”

The war, Kennan acknowledged, had left the Soviet Union weakened, with some twenty million of its people killed and the destruction of perhaps 25 percent of its fixed capital.
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Those losses would be offset, however, by the absorption of new populations to the west—the territorial gains Stalin had demanded and his allies had tacitly granted—together with the relocation and massive expansion of heavy industry required to repel Hitler’s invasion. When set against the coming collapse of Nazi Germany, these would make the U.S.S.R., whether for good or ill, “a single force greater than any other that will be left on the European continent when this war is over.”

That gave its internal configuration international significance. In seeking to map this, Kennan considered first “the spiritual life of the Russian people,” at once “the most important and the most mysterious of all the things that are happening in the Soviet state.” No shepherd ever guarded a flock more carefully than the Kremlin watched “the souls of its human charges,” and they responded with amiable acquiescence: “Bade to admire, they applaud generously and cheerfully. Bade to abhor, they strike a respectful attitude of hatred and indignation.” There was nothing new in such dissembling: Russians had long considered it “a national virtue.” It meant, though, that Soviet leaders could never really know what their people were thinking. “The strength of the Kremlin lies largely in the fact that it knows how to wait. But the strength of the Russian people lies in the fact that they know how to wait longer.”

Culture, in the meantime, was stagnating. The Bolsheviks’ triumph had stimulated creative minds, especially those of Jewish intellectuals: “It was their restless genius which contributed most to the keen and analytical quality of Soviet thought and Soviet feeling in the years immediately following the revolution.” But the Jews suffered disproportionately from Stalin’s purges, and now their influence was almost gone. In its place was a chauvinistic “cult of the past” that smothered innovations connected with the freedom of the spirit, the dignity of the individual, and the critical approach to human society. Only when Soviet power waned would Russian culture again give off those “effervescences of artistic genius” with which it had once “astounded the world.”

Politics, in such a society, could hardly exist: as in most authoritarian states, there was only a struggle to reach the ruler and to control his sources of information. Yet Stalin’s advisers knew little more than he about the outside world. Their judgments might occasionally correspond with reality, but these people were as often as not “the victims of their own slogans, the slaves of their own propaganda.... God knows what conclusions they draw from all this, and what recommendations they make on the basis of those conclusions.”

For this reason, Western concepts of collective security could only seem “naïve and unreal” in Moscow. Soviet leaders paid lip service to these principles when they wanted military assistance from the United States and Great Britain, but with the second front in place, they no longer needed to observe “excessive delicacy.” Their own priorities now took precedence, and these amounted simply to power. The form it took and the methods by which it was achieved were secondary issues: Moscow didn’t care whether a given area was “communistic” or not. The main thing was that it should be subject to Moscow’s control. The U.S.S.R. was thus committed to becoming “the dominant power of Eastern and Central Europe” and only then to cooperation with its Anglo-American allies. “The first of these programs implies taking. The second implies giving. No one can stop Russia from doing the taking, if she is determined to go through with it. No one can force Russia to do the giving, if she is determined not to go through with it.”

Understanding the Soviet Union, Kennan insisted, would require living with contradictions. Russians were used to “extreme cold and extreme heat, prolonged sloth and sudden feats of energy, exaggerated cruelty and exaggerated kindness, ostentatious wealth and dismal squalor, violent xenophobia and uncontrollable yearning for contact with the foreign world, vast power and the most abject slavery, simultaneous love and hate for the same objects.” Their life, hence, was not one of harmonious, integrated elements but an ever-shifting equilibrium between conflicting forces. No proposition about the U.S.S.R. could make sense “without seeking, and placing in apposition, its opposite.” It would also be necessary to realize that for the Soviet regime there were no objective criteria of right and wrong, or even of reality and unreality. Bolshevism had shown the possibility of making people “feel and believe practically anything.” Even an outsider, thrust into such a system, could easily become “the tool, rather than the master, of the material he is seeking to understand.”

Few Americans, Kennan was sure, would ever grasp this. Most would continue to wander about in a maze of confusion, with respect to Russia, not dissimilar to that confronting Alice in Wonderland. For anyone who did penetrate the mysteries, there would be few rewards. The best he could hope for would be “the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow, and where few will consent to believe that he has been.”

What Harriman thought of Kennan’s essay is not clear, although he carried a copy with him when he returned to Washington in October 1944. Probably as a result, other copies wound up in the State Department files and in the papers of Harry Hopkins. Kennan was “puzzled and moderately disappointed” by Harriman’s silence. He could understand why the ambassador might not wish to comment on content, since it was “politically unacceptable if not almost disloyal, in the light of the public attitude of our own Government.” But “I did think he might have observed, if he thought so, that it was well written. I personally felt, as I finished it, that I was making progress, technically and stylistically, in the curious art of writing for one’s self alone.”
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That was a shrewd assessment. “Russia—Seven Years Later” was impressive for the way it used the past in order to see the future. Contrary to what almost everyone else assumed at the time, Kennan portrayed the Soviet Union as a transitory phenomenon: it was floating along on the surface of Russian history, and currents deeper than anything Marx, Lenin, or Stalin had imagined would ultimately determine its fate. Decades before the documents opened, Kennan anticipated what they would reveal about the leadership’s ignorance of the outside world. His list of the intellectual adjustments Americans would have to make to understand the U.S.S.R. foreshadowed George Orwell’s dramatization of them, five years later, in his great novel
1984.
And the essay was indeed well written.

But as policy prescription, the paper failed. It was far too long and hence too discursive: if Harriman did try to slog through its twenty single-spaced legal-sized typed pages, his eyes probably glazed over when Kennan meandered off into Byzantine influences on Russian architecture, or nineteenth-century Russian music, or the complaint that “the last good novel was written—let me see—at least a decade ago.” Nor was Kennan’s argument always clear. For all the space he gave to it, he failed to explain how Russian culture affected Soviet behavior. He contradicted himself by claiming at one point that Kremlin leaders could never know what their people were thinking, while warning elsewhere of their ability totally to control that thinking. There were no clear recommendations for what the United States should do: this surely would have disappointed anyone who read the essay through to the end. They would have found there, instead, a self-indulgent self-portrait—the lonely expert atop the chilly and inhospitable mountain—which seemed to suggest that only Kennan was qualified to stand on that pinnacle, and that no one would take his conclusions seriously if he reached it. When conveyed in this form, he was correct.

“This is my sixth winter in Moscow,” George wrote Jeanette on January 25, 1945, “and I’m getting pretty well used to them. We are taking things pretty easy and just praying that they will really relieve me here in time to let me get home before the whole spring season is over.” The main subject of this letter—Jeanette having sent Betty MacDonald’s best seller
The Egg and I—
was chickens: “If we have any of our own on the farm, I’m afraid they’ll have to live by the survival of the fittest.” Jeanette knew her brother well enough to doubt, though, that he would ever take things easily, or that his principal preoccupation was poultry.
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She would have been right, for on the next day Kennan completed his sharpest attack yet on American policy toward the Soviet Union. It took the form of an eight-page personal letter to Chip Bohlen. Kennan wrote it knowing that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin would be meeting at Yalta on February 4, and that Bohlen—the president’s interpreter—would literally have his ear. He sent it four days after Harriman had left to supervise preparations: Hessman, who typed it, remembered that the ambassador’s absences seemed to liberate Kennan. This document too failed to achieve its purpose: given its startling contents, he could hardly have expected otherwise. But it did, with uncanny foresight, prescribe policy. By the middle of 1947 the U.S. government had agreed to almost everything Kennan had recommended. He was still lonely and unappreciated at the beginning of 1945, but that was only because he was two and a half years ahead of everyone else.
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Kennan began by reminding his old friend of a claim Bohlen had made the previous summer: that if Kennan had not been limited by “the narrow field of vision provided by Lisbon and the EAC, . . . I would have had more confidence in the pattern of things to come.” Six months in Moscow had expanded Kennan’s horizons, but without changing his conviction that Soviet political objectives in Europe were not consistent “with the happiness, prosperity or stability of international life on the rest of the continent.” Stalin and his subordinates viewed with suspicion “any source of unity or moral integrity” that they could not control. Rather than allow these to exist, there was no evil they would not be prepared to inflict, “if they could.”

No one was to blame for this: the situation was deeply rooted in Russian history and in European geography. Nor did Kennan question the need for Moscow’s assistance in defeating Nazi Germany: “We were too weak to win [the war] without Russia’s cooperation.” Nor could anyone doubt that the Soviet war effort had been “masterful and effective and must, to a certain extent, find its reward at the expense of other peoples in eastern and central Europe.”

He did wonder, though, “why we must associate ourselves with this political program, so hostile to the interests of the Atlantic community as a whole, so dangerous to everything which we need to see preserved in Europe.” Why not instead divide Europe “into spheres of influence—keep ourselves out of the Russian sphere and keep the Russians out of ours?” That would allow honesty in dealing with Moscow, while “within whatever sphere of action was left to us we could at least [try] to restore life, in the wake of the war, on a dignified and stable foundation.”