George F. Kennan : an American life

telegram” and the “X” article—as well as, through espionage, an unknown number of other Kennan dispatches and policy papers. He had made no effort to call off Soviet propagandists, who had been attacking Kennan for several years: Parker’s 1949 book, for example, had denounced him as “the first and in some ways the most influential agent of America’s warmongers,” a man “of violent hatred not only of the Soviet Union but of all democratic mankind.” The Foreign Ministry briefing prepared for Shvernik when Kennan presented his credentials in May 1952 claimed that he had shared the views of Nazi diplomats prior to World War II, called for the criminal prosecution of Soviet sympathizers in the United States, headed a foundation financing “reactionary organizations and political emigres” from Eastern Europe, and was plotting war against the U.S.S.R. and the other “people’s democracies.” It concluded, as if this were an offense also, that Kennan “knows the Russian language well.”⁴¹

And yet—Stalin did agree to accept Kennan as the new U.S. ambassador. It’s possible that he was playing a game all along, first by delaying the agrement to the appointment, then by greeting Kennan with an intensified anti-American propaganda campaign, then by trying to compromise him within his own embassy, then by planting a tantalizing question about him with Nenni, then by snubbing him while receiving Joxe —all the while plaguing him with bad service in Spaso House. That’s how it looked to Kennan, and that possibility would parallel the view most historians have of Stalin’s March 1952 note on Germany: that the old man was trying to keep his enemies off balance.

Another explanation, though, is that he was simply an old man. It’s at least as likely that Stalin had no coherent strategy, that his attention wandered from day to day, and that his subordinates were too terrified to point out the contradictions. It was during this period, after all, that Stalin unwisely launched a purge against his own doctors. Joxe, in contrast to Nenni, had found him showing his age. The French had the impression, Kennan reported, that Stalin “moved his left arm only with difficulty and that his bodily movements were in general labored and jerky.” There had been a revealing moment, also, during the Nenni interview: Stalin suddenly informed his guest that the staunchly anticommunist American Francis Cardinal Spellman had been present at the 1945 Yalta conference—he had not—and that it had been he who had turned Roosevelt against the Soviet Union, thereby confirming the Vatican’s hand behind every development unfavorable to Moscow.⁴² Perhaps it was just as well that Stalin didn’t know of Kennan’s letter to the pope, if it ever existed. Or maybe, even if it didn’t, he thought it did.

V.

“You should have seen us arrive in great style,” Annelise wrote Cousin Grace and Frieda Por in mid-July, two weeks after all six Kennans had landed in Moscow on their four-engine U.S. Air Force plane: “I almost felt important.” Accompanying them were a Danish couple to take over the Spaso House responsibilities of butler and cook, their three-year-old daughter who would be a playmate for Christopher, and a Danish nurse to manage all of the younger children—plus what seemed to Annelise a fortune in frozen meat, canned goods, whiskeys, and wines. Grace, on vacation from Radcliffe, took several embassy jobs, was pleased to get paid for them, but was not getting much sleep because “young girls are at a premium in the foreign colony.” Joan, who had stayed briefly in Moscow, was now in Kristiansand, not a bad thing since “there was nothing for her to do and she would have been very bored.” Full of energy but not as tractable as he used to be, “Tiffer Tennan” made sure that he was the center of attention: Wendy would “have to wait until she gets bigger.” It was just as well that she had turned out to be a girl.

Unlike George, Annelise did not find Moscow to be as oppressive as it had been in the late 1930s. There were goods, albeit expensive, in the stores, and people were better dressed than during the war: “They seem pretty friendly in spite of the anti-American campaign that [is] going on. They don’t dare have anything to do with us, but I am sure they would if the taboo was lifted.” With Spaso’s staff and her Danish helpers, Annelise could imagine spending a lot of time in bed, “but somehow it doesn’t work out quite that way. The house is really big and I would like to put a speedometer on myself to see how much ground I cover [in] a day.” Nevertheless, it seemed natural to be back in Moscow: “I’d been in Russia more than any other place since I’d been married.”⁴³

Things did get better, George acknowledged, after his family arrived. Under Annelise’s supervision and with the assistance of the Danes—whom the police could not easily intimidate—Spaso became more hospitable. There was even an opportunity for George, with Grace, to revisit Tolstoy’s home Yasnaya Polyana, where he had last been in 1935, sick, during a snowstorm, being nursed by the GPU. His ambassadorial angels again respected his privacy, allowing him a long talk with the great writer’s last secretary, Valentin Fedorovich Bulgakov, whose Russian carried “the authentic accent—rich, polished, elegant and musical—of the educated circles of those earlier times. So, I thought to myself, must Tolstoi himself have spoken.”⁴⁴

But running the embassy continued to frustrate Kennan. It was, he believed, “absurdly overstaffed.” The Soviet authorities were pressing for its relocation to a site more distant from the Kremlin. Meanwhile the younger Foreign Service officers were treating him, he complained to Bohlen, “with the same weary correctness which we reserved in our youth for chiefs whom we thought were hopelessly behind in their mental processes.” Two in particular provoked Kennan’s ire. They were Malcolm Toon and Richard Davies, later themselves ambassadors, respectively, to the Soviet Union and Poland, who after studying Russian at Columbia had been assigned to Moscow prior to Kennan’s appointment. They had the reputation, Cumming remembered, of being brilliant but troublesome: this the new ambassador certainly found them to be.⁴⁵

Toon and Davies had made the mistake, while still at Columbia, of entering an essay contest sponsored by the Foreign Service Journal. Without knowing that they would be working for Kennan, they decided to try their hand at a new “X” article, entitled “After Containment, What?” That strategy had been all right as far as it went, they argued, but it had done nothing to bring about “the destruction of Stalinism.” This would require a sustained effort to detach the Eastern European satellites from Soviet control, beginning right away with East Germany. Admittedly this might risk a third world war, but they concluded—rather too grandly—that such an outcome was unlikely. It “may not have been,” Davies later admitted, “the most judicious proposal” to have put forward at that particular time. “I may have been brash,” Toon added, “but I wasn’t stupid. I certainly would never have written this paper had I known [Kennan] was going to be our ambassador.” He and Davies were “quaking in our boots as to what would happen to us.”

“Friends” of the two arranged for Kennan to read their essay: soon thereafter the journal editors dropped it from consideration for a prize, indeed from publication in any form. Meanwhile the ambassador set about getting the miscreants out of Moscow. He requested early transfers—a cumbersome process—and approved unfavorable fitness reports that would plague the two for years to come. Three years earlier, however, Kennan himself had approved covert operations meant to bring about much of what Toon and Davies advocated. Some of his exasperation with them grew out of their open discussion of what should have been kept secret. Some of it may also have reflected concern over the 1952 presidential campaign: John Foster Dulles, no fan of Kennan’s, had condemned “containment” publicly in May and was calling for “liberation” as an alternative.⁴⁶

Kennan’s chief concern, however, was that the very success of Western policies—overt and covert—was making the Soviet regime desperate. It was behaving, he wrote to Doc Matthews, like a “savage beast” that “hisses and spits and snarls at us incessantly.” Only flimsy barriers deprived it of the pleasure, in the words of the Russian poet Aleksandr Blok, “of making our skeleton ‘clatter in his fond embrace.’ ” That made it all the more important to avoid provocations like the Toon-Davies article, or efforts to publicize a recent congressional report that had linked Stalin and his subordinates to the 1940 Katyn Forest massacre. It was of course accurate: no “serious student” of Soviet affairs believed otherwise. The truth would not shame the perpetrators of that atrocity, however, since their victims prior to Katyn ran “into the hundreds of thousands and probably millions.” Poking or prodding the beast made little sense, therefore, but perhaps someday, “if we keep cool and use our heads, we will manage to subdue him in such a way that he will cause us less trouble.”⁴⁷