[t]he athletes lined the rail of the ship and light-heartedly shouted their locker-room banter at the people on shore. It did not occur to them that these people would not be apt to understand much of it. They failed to notice that the country before their eyes was a country different—excitingly, provocatively different—from their own. To myself, for whom these transitions from one world to another had never ceased to be momentous, awe-compelling experiences, …this was a little sad.
George, Annelise, Grace, and Joan went by way of Kristiansand, Oslo, Copenhagen, and Helsinki to Leningrad, where the fortress of Kronstadt at the harbor entrance provided a grim welcome. Getting to the Moscow train was an ordeal, followed by terror when family, luggage, and George got separated in the midst of huge crowds. Reunited, they arrived the next morning in a rainstorm with no one to meet them, and so made their own way to the Mokhovaya, “drenched, disorganized, and entirely happy to be again among the people whose friendship and understanding still made Moscow the nearest thing in the world to home.”6
I.
Home, to be sure, had its problems. The Mokhovaya, constructed only of brick, wood, and plaster, was already falling apart, leaving cracks from which there emerged, according to an American inspection report, “countless moths, which feed upon the insulating material within the walls,” along with “roaches and other insects against which a constant battle must be fought.” Varying gas pressure made cooking uncertain, while electricity remained erratic. The building was poorly heated in winter, but when the weather was hot and the windows were open, layers of oil, soot, and dust blew in from the traffic on the street outside. Bathrooms doubled as laundry facilities, and servants slept in kitchens and halls. “Our friend Durby [Durbrow] had fought with our cook and fired her,” George wrote Jeanette. “We hunted for another one but couldn’t find any, and finally had to take the old bitch (she is generally referred to in this manner) back. We still have no nurse.”7 Nonetheless the living quarters were better than those of most other foreigners in Moscow, and the work that went on in the offices below was remarkable.
“It is not an exaggeration to say,” Kennan noted with pride the following year, “that by the beginning of 1937 the American Embassy at Moscow, which had started from scratch three years before, had become one of the two or three best-conducted and best-informed missions in the city.” He and four other Foreign Service officers sent the State Department 329 dispatches of an “original informative or reportorial” character in 1936, comprising 3,857 pages. Topics ranged from Soviet relations with the United States and other countries through the operations of the Communist International, Stalin’s first purge trials, the successes and shortcomings of the Soviet economy, the new draft constitution, and the activities of Americans living in the U.S.S.R. There were also reports on slum clearance, fish exports, fur auctions, sausage casings, and the All-Union Conference of Engineers’ Wives. At the department’s request, Kennan himself produced a 115-page analysis of Russian documents relating to the purchase of Alaska in 1867.
The embassy library received over a hundred Soviet and foreign newspapers daily, subscribed to between 350 and 400 periodicals, and maintained a collection of over a thousand books while forwarding additional copies to the legation in Riga and to the Division of Eastern European Affairs library in Washington. However moth-ridden and roach-infested it may have been, the Mokhovaya was now a major research center on Soviet affairs—so much so that department officials were beginning to grumble about the number of dispatches they were receiving, some of which seemed “unnecessarily voluminous.”8
The work was “very hard, very delicate, and quite thankless,” George wrote. “We don’t try to see anything of the Russians any more, except for a few official parties. It’s too risky for them.” The isolation of foreigners had never been greater, and the group that remained got smaller, more ingrown, and increasingly bored with each other. Social life within the embassy was, if anything, more intense. “Have been out every single night [except] last night,” Annelise added on January 2—George was back in Vienna for a medical checkup.
On the 30th Durbie had a few people in for dinner. At about 2 o’clock we were having such a good time that we decided we were celebrating New Years Eve in advance. I got home at 4:00, and 3 of the boys sat talking afterwards until 6. On New Years Eve I was first at the Hendersons, afterwards at the Metropole and finally ended at Durbie’s. Got to bed at 6, slept to 12, and felt fine. It always seems fatal when George is away about getting to bed at any reasonable hours.
It helped that there was now, for recreation, an American dacha outside Moscow, which several of the embassy bachelors had purchased. Not far from Stalin’s own country retreat, it had a log house, a tennis court, a garden, horses to ride, and a high wooden fence. There was something very comforting, Charlie Thayer remembered, “about driving through those big wooden gates after a long hard day trying to understand the Russians…. [T]he GPU seemed to disappear from existence.”9
The Kennans used the place regularly. “We had the feeling we could go out at any time,” Annelise remembered. Surrounding the dacha, George explained, was “the most wonderful riding country you can imagine. We make a point of saying good-day to all the peasants. They look as though they were seeing a ghost, and grope uncertainly for their hats. They think maybe the Revolution was all a bad dream, and that the masters are back in the saddle.” On one memorable occasion, George, Grace, and Stalin drove back from their respective dachas on the same road at the same time. As his limousine passed, the dictator “stared gloomily out of his window at Grace and myself and we stared back.”10
Still, Moscow was a difficult place to raise children. When Grace fell ill with bronchial pneumonia, no nurse dared enter a foreign embassy. A Russian doctor did come, but only after receiving permission from the Foreign Office, which also had to approve the use of a portable X-ray machine. “For one whole day,” George admitted, “I literally didn’t dare to hope that she would live.” He worried that “we wouldn’t even be able to find a priest to bury the little girl.” Grace recovered dramatically, however, and was soon sitting up and pestering everyone, being as naughty as one can be with “feet firmly on this earth.”
“I feel that I am ripe for a transfer,” Kennan confessed wearily at the end of this December 1936 letter to Jeanette. For in addition to the hardships of life in Moscow, he and his colleagues were developing “a doctrinaire skepticism which cannot be a good thing. We know so thoroughly the limitations of our job that it seems hard to see its possibilities…. [W]e have the psychology of old men.” The time had come to turn things over to people “whose experience is less and whose enthusiasm is greater. It will do us all good.”11
II.
That opportunity came quickly enough. Bullitt’s successor, Joseph E. Davies, arrived on January 19, 1937, with ample enthusiasm but no experience whatever. He was, like Bullitt, a friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but there the similarities ended. A lawyer, campaign contributor, and the new (but third) husband of Marjorie Merriweather Post, one of the richest women in the world, Davies was in every sense a political appointee. He was sleek, self-confident, hungry for publicity, and proud of not being a diplomat. He knew nothing of the Soviet Union but was sure that powerful men were the same everywhere and that he could, through the force of his own personality, get through to its leaders. All of this placed Davies at odds with the disillusioned Bullitt and the staff he had left behind. Davies “drew from the first instant our distrust and dislike,” Kennan recalled. “We doubted his seriousness…. We saw every evidence that his motives in accepting the post were personal and political and ulterior to any sense of the solemnity of the task itself.” At the end of the new ambassador’s first day in Moscow, Kennan and several other young career officers gathered in Henderson’s rooms to consider “whether we should resign in a body from the service.”12