George F. Kennan: An American Life (36 page)

Their government, however, was “a regime of unparalleled ruthlessness and jealousy, . . . determined that no outside influence shall touch them.” As long as it was in place, outsiders could do little. Generosity would only strengthen it. Blows aimed at it would excuse further repression. The wise American, therefore, would try neither to help nor to harm but instead to “make plain to Soviet acquaintances the minimum conditions on which he can envisage polite neighborly relations with them, the character of his own aspirations and the limits of his own patience.” He would then “leave the Russian people—unencumbered by foreign sentimentality as by foreign antagonism—to work out their own destiny in their own peculiar way.”
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SHORTLY BEFORE KENNAN LEFT ON HIS SIBERIAN TRIP, HE MOVED his family into a new Moscow apartment in the former Finnish legation, now empty because Finland and the Soviet Union had been on opposite sides during the war. The Finns had arranged, through the Swedes, to rent the building to the American embassy, which badly needed the space. The “Finnsky Dom,” George wrote Jeanette, was “vastly preferable” to the Mokhovaya, with its cacophonous street outside and an equally noisy elevator inside. “Here we have a garden, and a balcony, and peace and quiet at night, and a room for each of the children; and the servants are tucked away where you don’t stumble over them every day.” George’s career continued to prosper: on June 1, 1945, the Foreign Service promoted him to its Class I rank, at a salary of $9,000. He still worried, though, about the precariousness of his position: “You can easily imagine how delicate a job [this] is in these particular days, when the public eye is focused on Russian-American relations to an extent where one false step or unwise word could attract attention everywhere.”
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Some of the delicacy was Kennan’s own doing, given his repeated objections to his government’s policies. “I couldn’t be the sort of smooth, self-contained type of Foreign Service officer who advanced because he’d made no waves. It’s a wonder to me that I got along as well as I did.” It is indeed, but there were safeguards. One was the State Department’s respect for professional expertise. Having gone to the trouble to train Soviet specialists, it did what it could to protect them; Kennan, for all his prickliness, had long been regarded as the best of the group. Harriman too provided cover. He wanted a heretic working for him—although he rarely reassured the heretic—and Harriman usually got his way: “I was quite an arbitrary fellow in those days.” Finally, Kennan had a good track record. He had been right on the Azores bases and while serving on the European Advisory Commission. As the months passed in Moscow, Soviet behavior further enhanced his reputation by vindicating his pessimism about its future course.
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Shifting Washington’s policy, however, was more difficult than simply objecting to it. There were limits to what even a respected professional could do from a distance when hardly anyone outside his profession had ever heard of him.
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Kennan’s personal views were clear: he wanted to end any pretense of shared interests between the U.S.S.R. and the Western democracies. There should be an outright division of Europe into spheres of influence, with each side doing as it pleased in the territory it controlled. The term “Cold War” had not yet been invented, but its features had formed in Kennan’s mind. He thought it folly not to reshape strategy to fit them: to do anything less was to risk what remained of Europe. “We were . . . in danger of losing, like the dog standing over the reflecting pool, the bone in our mouth without obtaining the one we saw in the water.”
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Despite Truman’s tough talk in his first meeting with Molotov, neither he nor his advisers were prepared to go that far. Hopes persisted that differences with the Soviet Union reflected diplomatic failures, not fundamentally divergent visions of the postwar world. Not even Harriman, now gravely concerned about Stalin’s intentions, was ready to abandon negotiations, if only to show the American public that they had been given every chance. “I plagued whosoever might be prepared to listen, primarily the ambassador, with protests, urgings, and appeals of all sorts,” Kennan remembered, but to little avail. Even Harry Hopkins was getting impatient with him. “Then you think it’s just sin, and we should be agin it,” he admonished Kennan, after hearing his objections to the attempts Hopkins was making, on Truman’s behalf, to settle the Polish question through talks with Stalin in Moscow. “That’s just about right,” Kennan responded. “I respect your opinion,” Hopkins replied. “But I am not at liberty to accept it.”
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Faced with conflicting advice about what to do, Truman convinced himself that Stalin’s subordinates were to blame for the deterioration in Soviet-American relations that followed the Yalta conference. Like his predecessor, the new president sought a solution in another face-to-face meeting with the Kremlin boss—who seemed to him much like an American big city boss. It took place at Potsdam, just outside Berlin, during the last two weeks of July 1945. Midway through, the British electorate removed Churchill from office, leaving Stalin the only one of the original Big Three still in power. He had focused, since the war began, on how its conduct would determine the postwar settlement. Truman and Churchill’s successor, Clement Attlee, had hardly had time even to think about this.
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For Kennan, such thinking was fundamental. He had never understood how the fighting of the war could fail to affect the nature of the peace. He had always doubted that talks around big tables, whether at Tehran, Yalta, or Potsdam, would change much. With no one having listened, with the war at an end, with the agreements reached at Potsdam—as Kennan saw it—having once more papered over cracks, he saw no reason to remain in the Foreign Service. On August 20, 1945, he again submitted his resignation. He had long been contemplating this step, Kennan explained to H. Freeman (Doc) Matthews, the State Department’s director of European affairs. The reasons were personal—Moscow was no place to raise children—but also political: “a deep sense of frustration over our squandering of the political assets won at such cost by our recent war effort, over our failure to follow up our victories politically and over the obvious helplessness of our career diplomacy to exert any appreciable constructive influence on American policy at this juncture.”
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Despite the distinction he attained within it, Kennan had rarely found the Foreign Service rewarding. “He was never satisfied,” his friend and British embassy counterpart Frank Roberts recalled, “either with what he was doing or with what policy was [or with] what his effect on that policy could or should be.” His first resignation had come in 1927, only a year after he entered the service: Kennan’s superiors had persuaded him to stay on by offering the training that made him a Soviet specialist. No sooner had he become one than George was floating alternative possibilities—writing, teaching, farming—with his sister Jeanette. Losing his inheritance in 1932 ruled these out, and by the time the Kennans were again reasonably solvent, the war had started. George felt the obligation to see it through to the end, but he continued to write frequently—often wistfully—about doing something else. The farm made the prospect all the more alluring. George’s back-to-back letters to his sister and to Chip Bohlen in January 1945 showed that one part of his brain was thinking about chickens, while another was dividing Europe.
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Annelise was certainly ready to return to the United States. George cabled the news of his resignation while she was returning from Norway where, with Grace and Joan, she had been visiting Kristiansand for the first time since the Germans occupied it in 1940. “My heart gave a jump,” she replied. “It is a little scary, but only a little. We’ll make out all right, but it will be quite a change.” Her family had been well, but Norway no longer felt like home. “Maybe I took too readily to my adopted country.” Annelise suspected, though, that it was better that way: having “a longing in you for another country makes it impossible to be happy anywhere else.”
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George himself was longing for countries, or at least cities, other than Moscow. He welcomed the opportunity, therefore, to escort a group of American congressmen to Leningrad and Helsinki in September 1945. In contrast to his first visit, in 1934, the old capital evoked nostalgia, even a sense of coming home. Vivid images crowded his mind, and hence his diary:

Somehow in that city, “where I have never lived, there has nevertheless by some strange quirk of fate—a previous life, perhaps?—been deposited a portion of my own capacity to feel and to love, a portion—in other words—of my own life.”

From Leningrad, the trip was by train across former Finnish territory where the war had left few buildings standing. The gulls wheeling overhead mocked ruins below; healthy vegetation concealed land mines. At the new border, everything changed. There was a new station, simple, clean, and in good repair. Newspapers were on sale at a freshly painted kiosk. A fat, sleek horse pulled a peasant cart “with a happy briskness which no Russian horse possesses.” Sidings were full of freight cars hauling neatly packed war reparations east, leading Kennan to wonder whether these might induce “pangs of shame among the inhabitants of the great shoddy Russian world into which they were moving. But on second thought I was inclined to doubt this very strongly.”

The Finnish locomotive at last arrived, coupled onto the cars, and started off at a speed that seemed “positively giddy after the leisurely lumbering of Russian trains.” A diner offered good if scanty food. The other passengers were friendly and unafraid. The scene suggested “the efficiency, the trimness, the quietness and the boredom of bourgeois civilization; and these qualities smote with triple effect on the senses of a traveler long since removed from the impressions of [a] bourgeois environment.”
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The youthful Kennan had, from time to time, shown a certain disdain for that environment. Part of the fascination of Weimar Berlin—even more so of the Soviet Union when he first arrived there—had been that some other society seemed under construction, however harshly, inefficiently, and idealistically. Siberia still offered hints of that, but Stalinism had long since smothered such experimentation in the rest of Russia, leaving only a depressing seediness. The Finnsky Dom, hence, had been a relief after the Mokhovaya: seediness wears one out. And now Finland itself—a bourgeois horizon lying just across the Karelian isthmus—took on an almost mystical appeal, as it would for so many other foreigners in the U.S.S.R. over so many years.
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It was time to leave—but that did not happen quite yet.

“Dear Averell,” Kennan had written while Harriman was still at Potsdam in July: “Gibbon stated in the ‘Decline and Fall’ that the happiest times in the lives of peoples were those about which no history was written.” Moscow was quiet, with only the usual annoyances over staffing, housing, and courier services. “Compared to the questions you [are] discussing, . . . these problems seem small.”
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Perhaps so, but Kennan by then was beyond seeing anything as insignificant. His dispatches to Washington—on matters large and small—continued to be filled with portents of trouble to come.

An agreement between Soviet and Polish tourist agencies would restrict the free travel and residence of foreigners. A visiting journalist’s sympathetic newspaper story revealed how the cultivation of novices could undercut the reporting of professionals. The Kremlin would regard any withdrawal of American troops from western Czechoslovakia—which they had occupied at the end of the war—as a sign of weakness, despite wartime agreements that had assigned that territory to the Red Army. Soviet requests for postwar economic assistance were meant to sustain wartime levels of arms production. An Anglo-French plan to consult Moscow on the future of Tangier would provoke “a colorful revolutionary pronunciamento denouncing all interference in Morocco by great powers and calling on Moroccan proletariat to arise and eject them.”
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This last warning reflected a larger concern: that the international communist movement—which Stalin had appeared to disavow when he abolished the Comintern in 1943—remained in place and subject to his authority. Paris was the operational center for the European democracies, as were Cuba and Mexico for Latin America. The West had yet to grasp that some of its own citizens could be trained, like pets, “to heel without being on the leash.” To be sure, managing this network required finding the “almost imperceptible line which divides fancied independence of political action from the real thing.” But Soviet leaders had a great deal of experience in doing that.
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