May 8: More than thirty hours after signature of the act of surrender [by Germany to Allied forces in France], there had still been no recognition in Moscow of the fact that the end of the war was at hand…. For Russia peace, like everything else, can come only by ukase, and the end of hostilities must be determined not by the true course of events but by decision of the Kremlin.
Expecting the official announcement, Kennan and Roberts accepted invitations to a gala performance at the Bolshoi Theater that evening, only to find that it celebrated Aleksandr Popov, the alleged Russian inventor of radio.44
When the authorities did finally announce the end of the war, on May 9, they and everyone else were unprepared for what happened. The first spontaneous demonstration anyone could remember in Moscow broke out in front of the Mokhovaya, where Soviet and American flags were flying, and it would not disperse. “We were naturally moved and pleased by this manifestation of public feeling,” Kennan recalled, “but were at a loss to know how to respond to it.” Anyone venturing into the street “was immediately seized, tossed enthusiastically into the air, and passed on friendly hands over the heads of the crowd, to be lost, eventually, in a confused orgy of good feelings somewhere on its outer fringes. Few of us were willing to court this experience, so we lined the balconies and waved back as bravely as we could.”
Sensing that more was expected, Kennan climbed precariously onto a pedestal at the base of a column in front of the building to make his first and last public speech in Russian before the walls of the Kremlin: “Congratulations on the day of victory. All honor to the Soviet allies.” This was about all, it seemed, that “I could suitably say.”45
VII.
Kennan could, however, write—and the essay he composed that month was neither contradictory nor self-indulgent nor impractical. Entitled “Russia’s International Position at the Close of the War with Germany,” it expressed the hope that peace would not resemble the Russian summer, “faint and fleeting, tinged with reminders of rigors that recently were and rigors that are soon to come.” Reality, though, was likely to be just that. The war was ending with the defeat of two totalitarian states, but a third was poised to dominate much of the postwar world.
This was hardly an original insight. Bullitt had made the same point in a long letter to Roosevelt as early as January 1943. Harriman had been worrying about the war’s outcome since the summer of 1944 and now had influential supporters in Washington: by May 1945, for example, the new secretary of the Navy, James V. Forrestal, had concluded that Soviet ideology was “as incompatible with democracy as was Nazism or Fascism.” That same month Winston Churchill used the phrase “iron curtain” for the first time in seeking to alert Truman to the risks inherent in the way the war was ending.46
What set Kennan’s essay apart was not the alarm it expressed but the optimism it reflected: the Soviet Union’s position, he argued, was more likely in the long run to weaken it than to strengthen it. The reasons went back yet again to Gibbon, ancient Rome, and “the unnatural task of holding in submission distant peoples.” The U.S.S.R. had taken over, or incorporated within its sphere of influence, territories that even the tsars had never controlled. The peoples affected would resent Russian rule. Successful revolts “might shake the entire structure of Soviet power.”
Much would depend, therefore, upon the skill with which Stalin’s agents managed their new empire. They had the advantages of geographical proximity, experience in running a police state, and the disorientation the war had left behind. No one could expect popularity, though, “who holds that national salvation can come only through bondage to a greater nation.” The “naked bluntness” with which the Red Army had occupied these territories would make the task of running them even more difficult: in this sense, the Kremlin had been better served by the revolutionaries of the interwar era than by the generals and commissars “whose girth is no less and subtlety no greater than those of the Tsarist satraps of a hundred years ago.”
Nor could Moscow provide economic assets to offset political liabilities. Land reform would not put more food on people’s tables. Trade with the capitalists would undermine self-sufficiency. Heavy industry would drain resources from consumers, forcing them to accept a Soviet standard of living. There would of course be claims of economic success: “Russians are a nation of stage managers; and the deepest of their convictions is that things are not what they are, but only what they seem.” Non-Russians to the west were not likely to buy such arguments.
The Kremlin’s greatest difficulty, however, would come in administering its new empire. None of its peoples spoke Russian, and only 60 percent used other Slavic languages; few Russians knew any tongue other than their own. If Moscow sought local assistance, it would risk “disaffection, intrigue, and loss of control.” If it tried to train Russians in the appropriate languages and customs, they were likely to be “corrupted by the amenities and temptations of a more comfortable existence and a more tolerant atmosphere.” If it kept its agents isolated, or sent them only for brief periods of time, then they could hardly be effective either.
Curiously, Soviet leaders expected help from the West through recognition of the “independence” of states within their sphere, as well as help in repairing the economic damage their own policies were inflicting. They knew how often the Americans and British had been told that the only alternative to cooperation was another world war, in which civilization would face “complete catastrophe.” As long as the West believed this, it would not challenge Soviet policy, and Soviet policy would not change.
Should the West, contrary to expectations, muster up “political manliness,” the U.S.S.R. would probably not be able to maintain its hold on “all the territory over which it has today staked out a claim.” Communist parties throughout Western Europe would bare their fangs, and Molotov would no doubt threaten withdrawal from the United Nations. But the Soviet Union “would have played its last real card.” Further military advances would only increase responsibilities already beyond its capacity to meet. And it had no naval or air forces capable of challenging any position outside of Europe. No one in the Kremlin, however, believed that the West, “confronted with the life-size wolf of Soviet displeasure standing at the door and threatening to blow the house in,” would stand firm. “And it is on this disbelief that Soviet global policy is based.”47
This essay, Kennan recalled, “set forth for the first time—indeed, the writing of it evoked for the first time—thoughts that were to be basic to my view of Russia and its problems in future years.” It laid out the key assumption of what later became the strategy of “containment”: that the Soviet Union’s self-generated problems would frustrate its ambitions if the West was patient enough to wait for this to happen and firm enough to resist making concessions. “I didn’t say war was inevitable. I said we had to stand up to them. Time will have its effect, and… this is going to affect the regime.”
Kennan gave the paper to Harriman, who returned it without comment. Harry Hopkins may have read it when he visited Moscow in late May and early June. Otherwise, as with Kennan’s earlier efforts to “pluck people’s sleeves, trying to make them understand the nature of the phenomenon with which we in the Moscow embassy were daily confronted,” there was no response: “So far as official Washington was concerned, it had been to all intents and purposes like talking to a stone.”48