possibly win and that part of my obligation consisted of . . . taking upon myself the onus of whatever overt failures were involved .”6
What Kennan expected remains unclear. Exhausted from constant crises and furious criticism, Acheson knew that his term would soon end. This was no time for new initiatives, and Kennan had disagreed, over the past several years, with most of the old ones. He still harbored hopes of redesigning the Soviet-American relationship: the fact that “a friend of the Russian tradition” would be representing the United States “might not be lost” among Moscow’s artists and intellectuals, Kennan explained, a bit forlornly, to Richard Rovere of
On April 24, 1952, the
Old house and pleasing slopes, who have received us all these years like a warm, relaxed, motherly host, you have given us many things: your walls have echoed the Christmas hymns sung by childish voices; young people have danced the polka through the ground floor rooms; many evenings of talk have been spent around the fire; the gurgling of the little stream has many times lulled people to sleep who were tired and troubled from the cares of the city; we have all had health and enjoyment and hope and reassurance from your wordless, patient, kindly and mysterious influence.
Perhaps tonight I am sleeping here for the last time, and all this has gone, as in a dream. And therefore I ask you now—you who have been so mysteriously benevolent to me, let your spirit come into me on this night and enter my dreams; tell me something of your past and your meaning; tell me to what end you have been so kind to me and given me so much, that I may have strength to accept as past that which is past and go, strengthened and unregretful, into the future.8
The words were Kennan’s, but the tone, as he knew well, was that of Chekhov’s Madame Ranyevskaya, standing surrounded by suitcases in the final act of
II.
After an uneventful voyage, the Kennans spent a few days in London before meeting their own Air Force plane, which came equipped with a colonel—Annelise, “highly pregnant,” would have preferred a midwife. It flew them to Wiesbaden, where she was impressed to see George get the military honors of a five-star general. They then drove to Bad Godesberg, where she was to have the baby, while John and Patricia Davies, recently posted to Bonn, would help take care of Christopher. George proceeded to Berlin and after that Moscow, arriving there on the afternoon of May 6, having arranged to avoid the May Day celebrations with their inevitably anti-American character.10
It was his first trip back since 1946. A building boom was under way: massive wedding-cake structures were rising around the city, each thirty to forty stories high, all to be topped off with spires supporting garishly illuminated red stars. In contrast to what Kennan remembered from the war, urban transit was working: “They have traffic regulated within an inch of its life.” Off the main streets, there were still log cabins with no indoor plumbing, “but they are making progress.” At Spaso House, a few servants he remembered were there to greet him, including two elderly Chinese, who retained “a concept of their calling somewhat higher than that by which the Russians were animated.” All appeared to be under orders to show no pleasure at his arrival, however, and to do as little as possible to help him move in. Setting out for a walk the next day, he found his “angels”—the plainclothesmen assigned to follow him everywhere—waiting at the gate. Hugh Cumming and Elim O’Shaughnessy, the embassy’s second- and third-ranking officers, gave him lunch in the Kennans’ old apartment at the Mokhovaya. Dinner that evening was on a tray, “and here I am,” George wrote Annelise, “alone at night in the vast recesses of an empty Spaso.”
Recently redecorated, the house looked good on the inside, but the servant problem was serious: “I wish you were here to help, for I think you are the only person who can do anything.” He was already missing his family: “It seems like years, instead of just four days, since I said goodby to you.” Finding a bag filled with Christopher’s clothes had almost caused him to weep. But the little park in front of Spaso was full of children, “and I have hopes that if he is not too conspicuously dressed he will be able to play there normally.” There were hundreds of things to say, but it was hard to know where to begin, “and I am sleepy, so I will close now.”
“So you have had your baby!” he wrote on the eleventh, after the communications officer awakened him at three A.M. with the news. Because there were no direct telephone connections between Moscow and Bonn, he knew nothing other than that Annelise and her daughter were well, and that she was to be called Wendy. He was “mad with curiosity. What a feeling of frustration.” Nevertheless, “three girls and a boy now. . . . Just like my own mother’s family.”11
The new American ambassador presented his credentials to the figurehead Soviet president, Nikolay Shvernik, in a carefully scripted Kremlin ceremony on May 14. Speaking in Russian from a memorized text, Kennan expressed hope that his actions in Moscow would “meet with the understanding and collaboration of the Soviet Government.” Shvernik promised “collaboration” in his reply but said nothing about “understanding.” The event took place in the same ballroom where eighteen and a half years earlier a younger Kennan—having learned the night before of his father’s death—had stood behind a self-confident Bullitt, trying very hard not to faint. It had all gone like clockwork this time, George wrote Annelise: at least “what little potential value the position might have has not been diminished by anything that has happened so far.” Meanwhile “[w]e have gotten a vegetable garden worked up— lettuce, radishes, and dill already planted—tomatoes and beans to go in, with luck, this weekend.”12
Annelise’s first letter, written two days before the baby’s birth, reached Moscow via diplomatic pouch only on the fifteenth. By that time George was deeply into the round of calls he was expected to make on Soviet officials and members of the diplomatic corps. There would be, he estimated, fifty or sixty of these: he, in turn, would host return calls at Spaso House, a process that would go on for weeks. The mood, he warned her, “has become grim in a way it never was before.” Reinforcing it was a propaganda campaign that exceeded “in viciousness, shamelessness, mendacity and intensity” anything he had experienced before in the Soviet Union, or even in Nazi Germany. The purpose, he reported to the State Department on the twenty-second, appeared to be “to arouse hatred, revulsion and indignation with regard to Americans,” who were said to be using bacteriological weapons in Korea while torturing prisoners “with red hot irons, hanging them upside down, pouring water into their noses, forcibly tattooing them, forcing them to sign treasonable statements in blood, etc.” The vilification was “on a scale hardly excelled in human history.”13
Managing Spaso was still an ordeal. Burobin, the Central Bureau for Services to the Diplomatic Corps, supplied a staff of twenty-two, all of whom presumably reported to the secret police. They were under orders not to do anything other than what they had been told to do, to remain on the premises for as short a time as possible, “and above all never to permit themselves to enjoy, or feel a part of, the family in which they are working.” It was like
