Most of the Americans with whom he lunched that day, Kennan discovered, agreed with the great historian’s warning that there was nothing “more averse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations in opposition to their inclination and interest.”7 For the moment, this was reassuring. If there was anything “more hopeful than the skill with which our military men pursue the responsibilities of conquest, it is the alacrity with which they again drop them, once their possession is no longer in dispute.” Empires were not their avocation.
The Germans were still much on Kennan’s mind. Prisoners of war, he learned, had been claiming that the Americans were destroying Europe’s cultural values and turning it over to Bolshevism, “that we understand nothing of the continent, and have no plan for its future.” The charge sat strangely, Kennan thought, against discoveries “of SS torture instruments, of bodies without fingernails or toenails, of tons of high explosives hidden in the German Embassy.” But even if accurate, “the fault is still with the Germans for having provoked our intervention.”
We are bound to come over here every time anyone threatens the security of England; and if continental peoples do not wish to bring down upon their heads this dread plague of ununderstanding Americans, they must learn to leave the English alone. Let the Germans take a lesson from this, and not repeat their folly.
This thought too would stick with Kennan: that the national security of the United States was inseparable from the balance of power in Europe. Beyond that, though, the Americans were novices. “The French know exactly what they want, and are quite unreasonable about it. We are the soul of reasonableness and have only the dimmest idea of what we are after.”
No one could say the same of the Soviet Union. “Whoever would understand Russia today should study… the great mass of women of the educated officer class,” Kennan concluded after meeting one of them in Naples. For such women, “work is not a decoration to private life but a stern duty to the state. And independent thought is, as in Nazi Germany, a form of self-corruption, unnecessary, dangerous, immoral.” Nor was the tendency confined to women: it was what Bolshevism had done to Russia. Kennan thought it “the most terrifying and discouraging difference from our own mentality.”8
The next few days, which involved stops in Cairo, Baghdad, and Tehran, exposed Kennan for the first time to the Middle East. Overwhelmed by its heat, dust, and languor, repelled by the “religious bigotry” that—in contrast to the Russians—kept the feminine half of society under “indefinite house arrest,” he found little in the region to recommend it. The trip left Kennan with an aversion to what would later be called the “third world” that he did little, in his own later life, to overcome.9
In Baghdad, Kennan stayed with Loy Henderson, exiled there by Roosevelt, Henderson believed, for his anti-Soviet views. Stuck in the legation because it was too hot to go out during the day and too dangerous at night, Kennan persuaded himself that the very bleakness of the place might someday tempt Americans into trying to fix it: “If trees once grew here, could they not grow again? If rains once fell, could they not again be attracted from the inexhaustible resources of nature? Could not climate be altered, disease eradicated?” His countrymen would do better to return, “like disappointed but dutiful children, to the sad deficiencies and problems of their native land.”10
Kennan flew from Tehran to Moscow by way of Baku and Stalingrad on July 1, 1944. In the latter city, everything except the airport seemed to have been destroyed. Lunch was served in a dining hall with few chairs and only one glass, but everyone was good-natured about it: “How deeply one sympathizes with the Russians when one encounters the realities of the lives of the people and not the propagandistic preten[s]ions of their government.” On the final leg into Moscow, “I sat glued to the window, moved and fascinated to see before me again this great, fertile, mysterious country which I had spent so many years trying to understand.” Harriman had a car waiting at the airport, insisted on putting Kennan up at Spaso House, “and with that a new life began.”11
II.
Kennan found the Soviet Union less wracked by fear than it had been when he left it in 1937. Stalin’s purges had long since ended. Hitler’s attack and the brutality that followed had “pulled regime and people together, in a process for which the former, at any rate, can be highly thankful.” Soviet diplomats, to be sure, were still uneasy at social events with their Western counterparts, trying to imagine how what they said might sound “if repeated by an accusing comrade.” But national self-confidence as a whole had been greatly strengthened, for the Russian people had “repelled the invader and regained their territories in a series of military operations second in drama and grandeur to nothing else that the history of warfare can show.”12
Life in Moscow, if anything, was harsher than during Kennan’s earlier tour of duty. American embassy personnel had been evacuated to Kuibyshev after the Nazi invasion, leaving Spaso House and the Mokhovaya empty. By 1943, when they returned, both buildings had deteriorated, and not much had been done since to fix them. “All is as well as it could be in our little world,” Kennan wrote Bohlen in September 1944. By that he meant that “the building is falling to pieces, the majority of our cars don’t run, …[and] the mouse population is increasing fast after its war-time vicissitudes.” A State Department report, completed that summer, cataloged with grim precision what anyone assigned to Moscow should bring, keeping in mind weight limitations on airplanes: full dress evening attire with white tie, winter and summer clothing, overshoes and galoshes, socks and stockings, electrical appliances with adapters, radios and phonographs, extra eyeglasses, dental plates and prostheses. It warned not to expect drinkable tap water, fresh fruit, safe milk, palatable eggs, or recreational facilities: “There are no golf courses in the Soviet Union.” And it strongly advised against sending anyone with “chronic, relapsing or recurrent diseases,” such as “gastric or duodenal ulcer[s].”13
Despite the vicissitudes, Kennan was happy to be back. “Russia seems something poignantly familiar and significant to me,” he explained to Jeanette, “as though I had lived here in childhood.” Wandering the streets of Moscow and rambling through the nearby countryside left him with “an indescribable sort of satisfaction to feel myself back again in the midst of these people—with their tremendous, pulsating warmth and vitality.” He sometimes felt that he would rather be sent to Siberia with them, “which is certainly what would happen to me without delay if I were a Soviet citizen,” than to live among the “stuffy folk” on Park Avenue.
On the other hand, the knowledge that I will never be able to become part of them, that I must always remain a distrusted outsider, that all the promise of the white nights, of the lovely birches, of the far-flung rivers, and of a thousand other things that have meaning for me in Russia will never be realized—this knowledge was harder than ever to swallow this summer.
Having forced himself to acknowledge that he could never become a Russian—“for at the age of forty one cannot afford to be unrealistic”—George had the sense of having passed the point “before which one still hopes for some unfolding of the mystery and after which one settles down to derive such modest comforts as one can from the remaining years of life.”