Of course diplomacy required selling one’s soul “for a mess of very meretricious ministerial dignity.” But the price of souls, like everything else, was subject to the law of supply and demand: “Probably it is better to sell one’s soul… than to let it dry up in its own bitterness and get nothing for it whatsoever.” It was like hanging on too long to virginity, which “only too soon comes to be worth nothing at all.” And so in early November the Kennans were on their way back to Moscow: “I am looking forward to my return probably more than I should,” George wrote Bullitt, “more, in any case, than I can justify through any amount of rationalization—and don’t let anyone tell you I’m not.”36
V.
But while Kennan was balancing the competing claims of body, mind, family, and profession in Vienna, the Soviet Union had changed. Although hardly free from difficulties, the political atmosphere throughout most of 1934, he recalled, had been “far more friendly, pleasant, and relaxed than anything Russia was to know for another two decades.” The mood disappeared overnight, with the assassination, on December 1, of the Leningrad party boss, Sergei Kirov. It remains unclear, to this day, whether Stalin ordered the murder. But he used the provocation to consolidate absolute power through a wave of arrests, imprisonments, and executions that would terrorize the country for the next five years and would haunt it long after that. It was, as Kennan saw it, “one of the major catastrophes of Russian history… the revenge of the Revolution upon itself.”37
By the time the Kennans returned to Moscow in mid-November, George had to admit to Jeanette that the life to which he had looked forward was not likely to be possible. Foreign friends were leaving, and Russian friends were vanishing, “even the doctors and dentists who are bold enough to treat us.” Embassy life went on, but under the scrutiny of a staff riddled with spies. “Our position is precisely that of enemy negotiators in a hostile camp in time of war.” The Soviet government was behaving, indeed, “as if the war were already here.”38
There were still opportunities to travel, but only under strict police supervision. In mid-December Kennan attempted to visit Leo Tolstoy’s country home, Yasnaya Polyana, as an ordinary tourist, without seeking special privileges. The trip was exhausting, though, and he became ill on the way: Russia was still “a bad place for weak stomachs.” The GPU, which had been tailing him, intervened sympathetically to provide an overnight hotel room in Tula, a taxi to the estate the next day, and a guided tour, leaving Kennan with a rare feeling of gratitude to his minders—but also with the inescapable sense of being minded. The place reminded him of the Frosts’ country house, near Delafield, where he used to hike from St. John’s in the winter. “There was the same smell of apples and wood fires, the same chill in the corners away from the stove, the same sense of snow-covered fields outside.”39
Kennan devised a more ambitious challenge to his own stamina—and to GPU ingenuity—when he risked a journey to the Caucasus in March 1936. Official timetables promised regular air service from Moscow: “I insisted on putting it to the test and asked for a ticket.” Rather than admit that the flights did not exist, the authorities “placed a couple of ancient crates at my disposal.” One of them, assigned to fly Kennan from Kharkov to Rostov-on-the-Don, was an open monoplane. He arrived too frozen to speak, “to the consternation of a girl guide sent out to meet me, who saw her linguistic talents confronted with ignominious failure.” After thawing out, Kennan went more sensibly by train to the Black Sea, where he found tsarist hotels that were now proletarian “pig-sties,” and then to Georgia, where the air at least felt freer than in Russia. He returned by slow train from Tiflis, after which Moscow seemed “a haven of civilization, culture, and comfort.” Bullitt, who had suggested the trip, watched it carefully. His young aide arrived healthier than he had been for some time, he reported to the State Department. Perhaps there had been “no organic defect” at all, but “merely a general nervousness.”40
Bullitt was in his final months of service in Moscow: he would spend the summer and fall working for Roosevelt’s reelection, with the understanding that the president would then appoint him to some less demanding overseas post. With help from Kennan and his colleagues, the ambassador prepared a series of valedictory reports on what two and a half years of diplomatic relations had accomplished. The record was sparse: trade remained unimpressive, negotiations on debts and claims had broken down, there had been no further progress on the new embassy chancery, and the previous summer the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had hosted a meeting of the Third International, the organization dedicated to spreading revolution throughout the world. American communists attended, a blatant violation, Bullitt believed, of Litvinov’s promise to Roosevelt, in 1933, that the Soviet Union would refrain from interfering, in any way, in the nation’s domestic affairs. “[I]t must be recognized,” the ambassador warned dramatically in what the staff referred to as his “swan song” dispatch, that “communists are agents of a foreign power whose aim is not only to destroy the institutions and liberties of our country, but also to kill millions of Americans.”41
“People have sneered at Bullitt for the enthusiasm and optimism with which he approached his task in Russia, and for the meagerness of the results obtained,” Kennan wrote in 1938. That was, he thought, not fair: “It was a gallant try, …in a profession where risks are unavoidable.” He himself, however, had never shared Bullitt’s optimism: Kelley’s training had left him without illusions as to what diplomacy could accomplish in Moscow. Kennan also knew, from Russian history, that hostility toward the outside world was not new. To make this point, he prepared a report taken wholly from the dispatches of Neill S. Brown, the U.S. minister in St. Petersburg from 1850 to 1853. They had been found, Kennan claimed, in a pile of rubbish in what was left of the American legation there. “Secrecy and mystery characterize everything,” Brown had written, of the reign of Nicholas I. “Nothing is made public that is worth knowing.” The Russian government possessed, “in an exquisite degree, the art of worrying a foreign representative without giving him even the consolation of an insult.”
Delighted, Bullitt forwarded Brown’s observations to the State Department as an accurate picture of life in the Soviet Union in 1936: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Kennan saw in them the need to regard Bolshevism, “with all its hullabaloo about revolution,” not as a turning point in history, but as only another milepost in Russia’s “wasteful, painful progress from an obscure origin to an obscure destiny.” Nothing in Brown’s dispatches or in Kennan’s training, however, anticipated the horrors of Stalinism. If the purges continued, he concluded in another study written for Bullitt, “there would be nothing left of the Soviet system of government but rule by a small irresponsible group” whose authority rested only on “bread and circuses” and repressive police power: “in short, fascism.”42
This did not mean, though, that relations with the U.S.S.R. were useless. Bullitt’s “swan song,” in which he warned of the Soviet desire to “kill millions of Americans,” concluded on a wholly different note: “We should neither expect too much, nor despair of getting anything at all.” There is no way to know who drafted which portions, but the recommendations that followed—a patient balancing of competing pressures over a long period of time with a view to producing growth in desired directions—sounded more like Kennan’s methods for achieving physical health and psychological stability than like Bullitt’s emotional volatility: