Kennan returned to Moscow by air, a trip that itself required three days, several stops, and considerable improvisation. On the flight to Omsk, an illiterate old woman regaled him with observations on life reflecting “all the pungency and charm of the mental world of those who had never known the printed word.” Kennan shared his lunch with her under the tail of the plane after they landed, began reading Tolstoy aloud, and soon had half of their fellow passengers as an audience. Stuck overnight in Sverdlovsk with no continuing flight scheduled, Kennan watched gratefully as the local party secretary, shouting loudly over the phone, commandeered one. In Kazan, the police for once lost track of him, allowing Kennan the “pleasant and homelike, if slightly vulgar” experience of “sauntering on the streets of a Volga River town of a summer evening,” philosophically eating sunflower seeds and spitting out their husks. It provided “the same sense of bovine calm and superiority as chewing gum. For a moment I could almost forget that I was a foreigner in a country governed by people suspicious and resentful of all foreigners. But not for long.”
Flying to Moscow the next day, Kennan sat on a crate, looked out the window, and tried “to gather together into some sort of pattern the mass of impressions which the past fortnight had left upon me.” The Russians, he concluded, were “a talented, responsive people, capable of absorbing and enriching all forms of human experience.” They were “strangely tolerant of cruelty and carelessness yet highly conscious of ethical values.” They had emerged from the war “profoundly confident that they are destined to play a progressive and beneficial role in the affairs of the world, and eager to begin to do so.” How could Americans not sympathize with them?
Their government, however, was “a regime of unparalleled ruthlessness and jealousy, …determined that no outside influence shall touch them.” As long as it was in place, outsiders could do little. Generosity would only strengthen it. Blows aimed at it would excuse further repression. The wise American, therefore, would try neither to help nor to harm but instead to “make plain to Soviet acquaintances the minimum conditions on which he can envisage polite neighborly relations with them, the character of his own aspirations and the limits of his own patience.” He would then “leave the Russian people—unencumbered by foreign sentimentality as by foreign antagonism—to work out their own destiny in their own peculiar way.”50
TEN
A Very Long Telegram: 1945–1946
SHORTLY BEFORE KENNAN LEFT ON HIS SIBERIAN TRIP, HE MOVED his family into a new Moscow apartment in the former Finnish legation, now empty because Finland and the Soviet Union had been on opposite sides during the war. The Finns had arranged, through the Swedes, to rent the building to the American embassy, which badly needed the space. The “Finnsky Dom,” George wrote Jeanette, was “vastly preferable” to the Mokhovaya, with its cacophonous street outside and an equally noisy elevator inside. “Here we have a garden, and a balcony, and peace and quiet at night, and a room for each of the children; and the servants are tucked away where you don’t stumble over them every day.” George’s career continued to prosper: on June 1, 1945, the Foreign Service promoted him to its Class I rank, at a salary of $9,000. He still worried, though, about the precariousness of his position: “You can easily imagine how delicate a job [this] is in these particular days, when the public eye is focused on Russian-American relations to an extent where one false step or unwise word could attract attention everywhere.”1
Some of the delicacy was Kennan’s own doing, given his repeated objections to his government’s policies. “I couldn’t be the sort of smooth, self-contained type of Foreign Service officer who advanced because he’d made no waves. It’s a wonder to me that I got along as well as I did.” It is indeed, but there were safeguards. One was the State Department’s respect for professional expertise. Having gone to the trouble to train Soviet specialists, it did what it could to protect them; Kennan, for all his prickliness, had long been regarded as the best of the group. Harriman too provided cover. He wanted a heretic working for him—although he rarely reassured the heretic—and Harriman usually got his way: “I was quite an arbitrary fellow in those days.” Finally, Kennan had a good track record. He had been right on the Azores bases and while serving on the European Advisory Commission. As the months passed in Moscow, Soviet behavior further enhanced his reputation by vindicating his pessimism about its future course.2
Shifting Washington’s policy, however, was more difficult than simply objecting to it. There were limits to what even a respected professional could do from a distance when hardly anyone outside his profession had ever heard of him.3 Kennan’s personal views were clear: he wanted to end any pretense of shared interests between the U.S.S.R. and the Western democracies. There should be an outright division of Europe into spheres of influence, with each side doing as it pleased in the territory it controlled. The term “Cold War” had not yet been invented, but its features had formed in Kennan’s mind. He thought it folly not to reshape strategy to fit them: to do anything less was to risk what remained of Europe. “We were… in danger of losing, like the dog standing over the reflecting pool, the bone in our mouth without obtaining the one we saw in the water.”4
Despite Truman’s tough talk in his first meeting with Molotov, neither he nor his advisers were prepared to go that far. Hopes persisted that differences with the Soviet Union reflected diplomatic failures, not fundamentally divergent visions of the postwar world. Not even Harriman, now gravely concerned about Stalin’s intentions, was ready to abandon negotiations, if only to show the American public that they had been given every chance. “I plagued whosoever might be prepared to listen, primarily the ambassador, with protests, urgings, and appeals of all sorts,” Kennan remembered, but to little avail. Even Harry Hopkins was getting impatient with him. “Then you think it’s just sin, and we should be agin it,” he admonished Kennan, after hearing his objections to the attempts Hopkins was making, on Truman’s behalf, to settle the Polish question through talks with Stalin in Moscow. “That’s just about right,” Kennan responded. “I respect your opinion,” Hopkins replied. “But I am not at liberty to accept it.”5
Faced with conflicting advice about what to do, Truman convinced himself that Stalin’s subordinates were to blame for the deterioration in Soviet-American relations that followed the Yalta conference. Like his predecessor, the new president sought a solution in another face-to-face meeting with the Kremlin boss—who seemed to him much like an American big city boss. It took place at Potsdam, just outside Berlin, during the last two weeks of July 1945. Midway through, the British electorate removed Churchill from office, leaving Stalin the only one of the original Big Three still in power. He had focused, since the war began, on how its conduct would determine the postwar settlement. Truman and Churchill’s successor, Clement Attlee, had hardly had time even to think about this.6
For Kennan, such thinking was fundamental. He had never understood how the fighting of the war could fail to affect the nature of the peace. He had always doubted that talks around big tables, whether at Tehran, Yalta, or Potsdam, would change much. With no one having listened, with the war at an end, with the agreements reached at Potsdam—as Kennan saw it—having once more papered over cracks, he saw no reason to remain in the Foreign Service. On August 20, 1945, he again submitted his resignation. He had long been contemplating this step, Kennan explained to H. Freeman (Doc) Matthews, the State Department’s director of European affairs. The reasons were personal—Moscow was no place to raise children—but also politicaclass="underline" “a deep sense of frustration over our squandering of the political assets won at such cost by our recent war effort, over our failure to follow up our victories politically and over the obvious helplessness of our career diplomacy to exert any appreciable constructive influence on American policy at this juncture.”7