just that misfortune in 1951 and had been court-martialed as a result. Kirk’s wife, Lydia Chapin Kirk, had committed a less serious indiscretion by rushing a gossipy account of Spaso House life into print in the United States before her husband had formally resigned. George was not about to risk adding to “the follies of our predecessors,” he wrote to Annelise early in June 1952. Because of them, she should “not be surprised at the coolness of the reception that awaits you in Moscow . . . I am not.”22
Nonetheless he was surprised. Sir Alvary Gascoigne, the British ambassador, found Kennan unprepared for how differently foreign missions were treated from when he had last served in the U.S.S.R.: “This came as quite a shock to him.” Cumming remembered Kennan returning from a walk one day soon after his arrival, so subdued that he seemed ill. “Hugh, I am shocked to discover [that] the Soviets regard me as such a dangerous person.” I said: “What do you mean?” “Why, this outbreak of anti-American posters all over the town.” “George, those damn things have been there for months! I honestly don’t think that they have anything personally to do with you.” But Kennan wasn’t listening: he got “that rather distant, misty look in his eyes,” which showed that he was composing a dispatch. Calling in a secretary—not Hessman, who would only later join him in Moscow—he “lay down on the sofa to dictate, almost like a patient in a psychoanalyst’s office. I envied him the ability,” Cumming recalled, “to do that.”23
The result was a long letter to Doc Matthews, pouched to Washington to ensure security. There were, Kennan suggested, four possible reasons for the Kremlin’s propaganda offensive. The first was to boost sagging morale in the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist world, where there was “widespread political apathy and skepticism.” With the exception of the wartime years, however, that disillusionment had been present since the purges of the late 1930s—alone it could not account for what now was going on. A second explanation was mobilization for war: Kennan had never believed, though, that Stalin would deliberately unleash one. A third was some kind of leadership struggle, but there was no hard evidence for this. That left a fourth possibility, which was that the campaign “might have something to do with my own appointment and arrival.”
Kennan was known to Stalin and his associates, after all, as someone who was
Let us remember that it has been the policy, and apparently sometimes the secret delight, of Stalin, before adopting a given course, to eliminate or force into an embarrassing position all those who might be suspected of having themselves favored such a course.
It was also important to the Kremlin leaders, when on the verge of making even minor concessions, not to seem to have been pressured into doing so.
This might have particular relation to myself if they felt that my personality and presence here tied in in any way with the neurotic uneasiness which besets a large number of Soviet artists and intellectuals in present circumstances in connection with their extreme isolation from the main cultural currents of the world.
If Stalin did see any possibility of a Cold War settlement, then, he might think it useful “to remind a new and somewhat inscrutable American Ambassador . . . that if he is going to talk to anyone around here it is going to be to Papa—that the other members of the family know their places and are well in hand.”
But an invitation to talk with Papa would have thrilled Kennan, even though he had resolved—given his lack of instructions from Washington—not to ask for one: why did he still feel threatened? He now came up with a fifth explanation, which was that the Soviet authorities had developed a “reckless contempt for whatever values and safeguards might conceivably still lie in the maintenance of the normal diplomatic channel.” That had not happened during Kennan’s previous service in Moscow. Now, though, the restraint was gone. There was, in its place, “the excited, uncertain bravado of the parvenu who thinks that his fortunes have advanced to the point where he need no longer pretend to be a man of correct behavior or even a man of respect for correct behavior.” It was
the swaggering arrogance of the drunken peasant-speculator Lopakhin in the last act of Chekhov’s
If this was right, “then we have a bitter problem on our hands.” Restoring sobriety and decorum among such people would take “real thought and skillful action on our part, and probably luck as well.”24
The contradictions in this letter can only have bewildered its readers. Kennan portrayed a Soviet leadership that both needed a settlement and did not need one. He hoped for diplomacy in a state that, he insisted, had given up on diplomacy. He described anti-Americanism as a shocking development, but he had been arguing, as far back as the “long telegram,” that Stalin’s regime required a hostile outside world. He placed himself at the center of the aging dictator’s concerns despite having noted, before leaving for Moscow, that successful ambassadors there practiced self-effacement. Kennan cast himself in the role of someone Stalin might enjoy eliminating, or at least forcing into an “embarrassing position,” but with whom he would be eager to negotiate. None of these claims were necessarily implausible: they could hardly all be plausible, however, at the same time. “George is an egocentric person, a highly emotional person,” Cumming explained years later. “It’s a strange combination of a well-drilled mind, a fine command of the English language, and yet shot through all of this is this emotional response to external stimuli, which somehow or another his well-drilled mind doesn’t seem to be able to control.”25
The problem was evident in a second letter Kennan pouched to Matthews two weeks later, complaining about the intelligence-gathering activities of American military attaches in Moscow. These involved the use of cameras, radio receivers, and listening devices to collect information from embassy buildings and vehicles. A favorite opportunity was Aviation Day, in July, when the Americans would invite their British and Norwegian counterparts to the roof of the Mokhovaya to photograph the planes flying over, and then downstairs for drinks. It was done so openly, Kennan pointed out, that the Soviets had their own photographers documenting the activity, apparently with a view to compiling a dossier. Like the Grow diary and Mrs. Kirk’s book, these provocations encouraged retaliation: their continuation placed in jeopardy “the physical security of the members of the [American] mission and their families.” Diplomatic immunity could only extend so far: if relations ruptured or if war broke out, it was entirely possible that the staff “might suffer seriously by virtue of these activities that have been conducted in the past.”
So he had ordered a halt to them—despite warnings from the attaches that their superiors would not welcome the prohibition—and he would stick to that policy unless otherwise instructed from Washington. Cumming thought this naive: “The Russians would do it in [the United States] if they didn’t have other ways of getting things.” And Kennan knew, from his own experiences dating back to the days of Joe Davies, how thoroughly the Soviets had compromised the immunity of Spaso House by installing their own bugs, as well as servants who were also spies. “We never talked, really, very much, even in the privacy of [our] bedroom,” Annelise recalled. “It makes you absolutely tongue-tied.” By 1952 there was even a microwave beam aimed at the windows in Kennan’s Mokhovaya office, presumably in an effort to pick up conversations there.26
