VIII.
With the war over, George Kennan sent himself to Siberia. He had requested permission to go soon after arriving in Moscow the year before, and following months of delay the approval, to his surprise, came through. The ostensible reason for the trip was to visit the new industrial complex at Stalinsk-Kuznetsk (now Novokuznetsk), a massive steel production facility southeast of Novosibirsk where few if any foreigners had ever been. But there was also a personal motive, which was “the example of my distinguished nineteenth century namesake. I wanted, before leaving Russia again, to see at least a small portion of the vast Siberian territory where so many of his travels had taken place and with which his name was so widely associated.”49
The first George Kennan had crossed Siberia by horse-drawn carriages and sleighs because the railroad to Vladivostok would not become fully operational until 1905. Four decades later, on June 9, 1945, the second George Kennan boarded the Trans-Siberian Express in Moscow, relishing the opportunity to relax and to watch the country and its inhabitants go by. He had a compartment to himself but shared a washroom with two taciturn secret police agents, stationed next door. Two good-natured car attendants, Zinya and Marusya, kept a samovar going with scraps of wood collected at frequent station stops along the way, while shooing away anyone trying to hitch an unauthorized ride.
There, on the black cinder-track, hard-trodden and greasy with the oil and the droppings from the trains, under the feet of the milling crowds of passengers, train personnel and station hangers-on, without regard for the clouds of soot and dust, a thriving business was done: milk was cheerfully poured from old jugs into empty vodka flasks or army canteens; greasy cakes were fingered tentatively by hands black with train soot; arguments ran their course; bargains were struck; passengers pushed their way triumphantly back to the cars, clutching their acquisitions; and timid little girls with bare feet, who had not succeeded in selling their offerings, stood by in sad and tearless patience, awaiting with all the stoicism of their race the maternal wrath which would await them when the train had gone and they would return home with their tidbits unsold.
At one stop a soldier accused an old woman of cheating him. “‘You’d better be careful, little mother,’ he said gaily, ‘not to run across me in the other world. The archangels are all my friends.’ To the crowd’s delight, the old girl crossed herself anxiously; and the incident ended in general laughter.”
The trip took four days. Fellow passengers were pleasant but wary: “We didn’t talk much.” One evening, however, Kennan passed around copies of the American embassy’s Russian-language magazine, provoking a lively corridor discussion on the transition from Roosevelt to Truman. “Then everybody began to look guiltily over his shoulder and the meeting quickly dispersed.” With traffic on the line heavy,
we were only one link in the long chain of trains, tiny trains against the surrounding distances, crawling eastward like worms, haltingly and with innumerable interruptions…. We stopped more than we moved; and when we stopped, we could see the freight trains piling up behind us, and hear them whistling for the right of way with the deep throaty voice which only trains in Russia and America have, and which brings nostalgia to every American heart.
The waits were long enough for the passengers to get off and pick flowers: at one point, “when the train stopped among the swamps, we climbed down the embankment, took off our shirts, splashed off the yellow scum from the surface…, and washed our heads in the cool dark liquid from underneath.” Toward Novosibirsk, the prairie became “completely flat, treeless, shrouded in streaks of ground-mist; and the dome of the sky stretched out to tremendous distances, as though vainly trying to encompass the limits of the great plain.”
Kennan arrived weary, wilted, and without an appetite after ninety-eight hours on the train, to be greeted with the usual Russian dinner accorded visiting dignitaries. It included of course vodka, as well as “river fish, salmon, cold meat, radishes, cucumbers, cheese, hard boiled eggs, bread and butter, soup, beer, steak, fried potatoes, fried eggs, cake, and tea.” Each refusal was “an indication that the respective dish was not good enough,” which served only “to stimulate my host and the waitress to new feats of hospitality.” Upon recovering, Kennan felt well enough to inspect an airplane factory and an experimental farm, to attend a football match, the circus, and the Jewish theater—evacuated from Minsk early in the war, and “still playing on odd nights in Yiddish to a full house”—and to take in an opera in an enormous new theater, the largest in the Soviet Union, for which the funds had been raised locally, in wartime, with the streets surrounding it “still those of a Siberian village.” There could be “no more flamboyant a repudiation of the past, no more arrogant expression of confidence in the future, than the erection of this almost mystical structure on the remote banks of the Ob.”
After several days Kennan continued by train to Stalinsk-Kuznetsk, a city that fifteen years earlier had been a swamp. It now contained thousands of workers and their families, as well as one of the largest steel mills in the Soviet Union. Obviously it had required “a great feat of willpower and organization to build and put into operation at all an establishment of this size in a place so remote from the other industrial centers.” Perhaps the sacrifices had been worth it if the plant had helped to win the war, but it had clearly cost far more to build and to operate than a comparable facility in the United States. State-sanctioned “labor unions” placed production ahead of the safety, health, and welfare of the workers. A nearby collective farm provided the state with a reliable supply of agricultural commodities, but its peasants seemed “as effectively bound to their place of work as were the Russian serfs of the period before emancipation.”
Banquets continued to be a challenge. “I am having an extremely interesting and enjoyable trip,” George wrote Jeanette on a postcard he mailed from Stalinsk-Kuznetsk. “I am constantly reminded here of G. K. the elder and his travels. Fortunately for me, I have none of his physical hardships to cope with; but I face a culinary hospitality before which I think even he, in the end, would have wavered.” The police, if curious about the identity of “G. K.,” failed to pursue the matter, and the card made it safely to Highland Park.
Back in Novosibirsk on a hot day, Kennan suggested to one of his handlers that they take a swim. They chose the river, surely a site known to the first George Kennan, but now with the great railroad bridge and the gigantic opera house looming in the distance. Still, “[l]ittle naked boys poked along the shore in a leaky old row boat as boys will do everywhere.” The scene led Kennan to wonder whether Russian dreams of grandeur would not at some point “cut loose from all connection with reality and begin some fantastic colossus of a project, build part of it hastily and with bad materials, never to finish it, and then leave the beginnings to rot away or be used for utterly incongruous purposes.” If so, the Ob would remain, flowing quietly toward the Arctic Ocean. “And probably, regardless of what marvels had or had not been constructed on shore, for countless summers naked little boys would continue to find leaky old boats and to pole their way up and down the stream…, shouting and splashing, cutting their feet on the rocks, and making astounding discoveries about the nature of rivers and the contents of river bottoms.”