Kennan concluded that this was a message to him from Stalin: “I know, you son of a bitch, what you’re here for. I’ll send the fitting sort of fellow to you. Let’s see what you do.” Cumming was at first more skeptical, because “George always tended to regard things personally, as a provocation of some kind.” There had been other incidents of Russians trying to break into the Mokhovaya: one, at just this time, involved a demented man who ran past the militia, stationed himself in the commissary, seized a hammer, demanded asylum, and threatened to kill himself if he did not get it. With Kennan’s approval, the Soviet authorities were allowed into the embassy to remove him. That intruder, however, had not proposed an assassination plot. This one did, and the fact that he was a Foreign Ministry interpreter—Cumming confirmed this by finding him in a photograph, taken a year earlier, of the ceremony at which Gascoigne, the British ambassador, had presented his credentials—lent plausibility to Kennan’s hypothesis. No genuine conspirator would have used so conspicuous a method of signaling his intentions, without any prior assurance of how he would be received.33
The intruder was in fact Nikolay Nikolayevich Yakovlev, the son not of Abakumov but of a Soviet marshal who had just been arrested—so too had young Nikolay. A third Nikolay, General Vlasik, the head of Stalin’s security detail, “came to see me in my solitary confinement and offered a deal: my only chance to survive . . . was to go to the American Embassy, to see Kennan himself, and make him believe a story which had been prepared for me.” Yakovlev was given no other information, “but the whole plot was clear to me even without that.”
I accepted the offer without much deliberation: by then I had been severely beaten several times and had many teeth broken; so, for me, there was not much of a choice. In a few days I was put back in shape and was fit enough to go to Kennan. I must have been very nervous, Kennan was very frosty, and gave me a nasty turn-around. I was taken back to [the] Lubyanka and never saw Vlasik again, but obviously he wasn’t pleased with my performance, since though the beatings ceased I was let out only after Stalin’s death.
Yakovlev later became one of the first Soviet historians of the Cold War, well known for his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy (based only on American sources, no Soviet documents being available at the time), his attacks on prominent dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov (which he probably had no choice but to make), and his tortured ambivalence about George F. Kennan.34
Was the Yakovlev intrusion a test Stalin devised? Salisbury thought so at the time, and there is some evidence to support this possibility. It emerges, circuitously, from an interview the Kremlin boss granted to the Italian socialist Pietro Nenni, a recent recipient of the Stalin Peace Prize, on July 17, 1952. Such meetings were rare enough to send embassies all over Moscow scrambling for information, and in a report to Acheson on the twenty- fifth, Kennan summarized what he had learned about this one. His source was the Italian ambassador, Mario Di Stefano, an old friend from earlier service together in the U.S.S.R. Stalin had been in good health, Nenni told Di Stefano, had shown a keen interest in Italian politics, and had reconciled himself to the indefinite division of Germany. Nenni then asked about Kennan: “whether I really entertained friendly feelings toward Russia.” Di Stefano replied “that I had come here in the hopes of bettering the situation and of getting some idea of the thinking of the Kremlin on present international problems.”35
Kennan made no immediate effort to assess this query, although it would not have struck him as an idle one: had Stalin asked Nenni to make it? Salisbury, who also talked with Di Stefano, concluded that he had: “I wish Kennan and I had known each other better in those times and had been able to talk more freely.” Salisbury had something else to regret, which was that the indefatigable Alsops scooped him. It was “at least conceivable,” they wrote in their syndicated column on August 8, that “Nenni’s questions about Ambassador Kennan . . . might mean that the men in the Kremlin are considering some sort of approach to the American Government through Kennan.” Combined with the information about Germany, the Nenni interview “seems to hold out two rather small and quite possibly deceptive crumbs of comfort.”36
The next day the Milan newspaper
Then, on August 23, Stalin received the new French ambassador, Louis Joxe, for a twenty-minute visit. Kennan was furious. Joxe had not informed him that he was seeking the meeting: he had been “ill-advised” to proceed without receiving any indication that Stalin wished to see him. The “obvious purpose” was to drive a wedge between the French, the British, and the Americans, since neither Kennan nor Gascoigne had received an invitation. (Someone in Washington, on reading this telegram, scribbled in the margin: “Did GFK ever ask?”) Joxe’s reception “may have been . . . intended as a reproach to me or as a means of embarrassing me,” Kennan wrote Doc Matthews, “by conveying the implication that had I made a similar request I also would have been received.” But he professed to be content:
What these people need is to be left alone for a while and taught that other people are capable of doing without them, and I am quite sure that when the proper time comes for me to see Stalin (and this might be at any time for any number of reasons) my usefulness on that occasion will be enhanced, rather than otherwise, by virtue of the fact that I have refrained from bothering him until I really had something to talk about.
After reading a similar complaint from Gascoigne, however, Sir Pierson Dixon of the British Foreign Office put a different spin on the situation: “There is a certain puckishness about Stalin, and I dare say he could not resist the temptation of setting the Chancelleries buzzing by seeing the new French ambassador on the eve of the latest Soviet note on Germany.”38
The note on Germany restated a surprising proposal Stalin had first put forward on March 10, 1952: that the four occupying powers agree to hold free elections throughout Germany, looking toward the establishment of an independent, reunified, rearmed, but neutral state. This seemed to confirm Bohlen’s sense, from the previous summer, that Stalin was ready to talk; it also echoed, remarkably closely, Kennan’s Program A. Yet few historians today believe that Stalin was sincere, and Kennan at the time was skeptical. The Soviet initiative appeared to be a last-minute effort to split West Germany from its European and American allies on the eve of its integration into a European Defense Community closely linked to NATO. When it failed, as Stalin seems to have expected it would, he at last reconciled himself to the prospect that the Soviet Union would never control any more than the eastern third of its former adversary: short of war, Germany and Europe would remain divided. The Nenni interview gave Western diplomats their first hint of this shift in Stalin’s thinking.39 There is irony, nonetheless, in the fact that Stalin’s ideas appear to have come closest to Kennan’s—if only briefly—during a period in which Kennan was just a phone call, and a few minutes’ walk, away. But neither picked up the phone: each may have been waiting for the other to do so.
Kennan, of course, had no instructions from Acheson to explore Stalin’s intentions. The March 1952 note had initially intrigued the secretary of state—as had Program A—but he backed off when the British, the French, and the West Germans made it clear that they did not wish to pursue the idea. By late May, Kennan was dismissing the most recent version of Stalin’s suggestion as having been prepared “by hacks supplied only with grudging, cryptic, and guarded instructions and told to make the best of it.”40 And by the end of August—after the Nenni leak and the Joxe interview—he was insisting that the Soviet leader must come to him, not the other way around, a tone more appropriate for a head of state than for an ambassador.
Stalin’s behavior is more difficult to explain. He certainly knew who Kennan was, having read both the “long
