George F. Kennan : an American life

Carefully researched and compulsively documented, Russia Leaves the War devoted over five hundred pages to just four months—the period from the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in November 1917 to their separate peace with Germany in March 1918. The book would become “the classic work in its field,” Yale’s Frederick C. Barghoorn wrote in the Political Science Quarterly, but it was “somewhat too detailed, considering the shortness of the period covered.” Dexter Perkins, of the Cornell History Department, suggested that Kennan had tried too hard to follow the example of “scientific” scholarship, and Kennan acknowledged as much in a letter to Herbert Butterfield: “The amateur’s lack of self-confidence—the fear of being criticized by professional historians,” had certainly been one of the reasons “why I dredged up and hurled at the reader this appalling accumulation of detail.”

The book’s readability, however, made it anything but ponderous. Kennan had spent most of his life sketching scenes in his diary and correspondence, but he had never published anything like the opening paragraph of Russia Leaves the War:

The city of Sankt Petersburgh—St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, call it what you will—is one of the strangest, loveliest, most terrible, and most dramatic of the world’s great urban centers. The high northern latitude, the extreme slant of the sun’s rays, the flatness of the terrain, the frequent breaking of the landscape by wide, shimmering expanses of water: all these combine to accent the horizontal at the expense of the vertical and to create everywhere the sense of immense space, distance, and power. The heaven is vast, the skyline remote and extended. Cleaving the city down the center, the cold waters of the Neva move silently and swiftly, like a slab of smooth grey metal, past the granite embankments and the ponderous palaces, bringing with them the tang of the lonely wastes of forests and swamp from which they have emerged. At every hand one feels the proximity of the great wilderness of the Russian north—silent, sombre, infinitely patient.

Personalities, too, came alive, as in Kennan’s characterization of the volcanically hyperactive Raymond Robins:

His concept of diplomacy was a deeply personal one, in which understanding came to rest upon the fire of a glance or the firmness of a handclasp. He suffered, in his state of exalted and dedicated enthusiasm, from an inability to find with other men any normal middle ground of association between the extremes of passionate loyalty and dark suspicion.

Kennan seasoned his scholarship with his own Foreign Service experience. “Like many American diplomatists who had gone before, and many who were to come after,” he wrote of Ambassador Francis and his perplexed subordinates,

they were left to vegetate as best they could at their foreign stations, gleaning their understanding of the rationale of American policy from the press or from such cryptic hints as might from time to time be given them, sending their interpretive reports to a Department of State wrapped in a deep and enigmatic silence, endeavoring uncomfortably to conceal from the governments to which they were accredited the full measure of their helplessness and lack of influence.

The finest feature of Russia Leaves the War, Barghoorn concluded, was its “charitable spirit.” Kennan revealed “follies and frailties” without being “harsh, intolerant, or dogmatic.” In that respect, as in others, he had “set a splendid example.”¹⁰

Kennan embedded substantive themes within his narrative. One contrasted the purposefulness of Lenin and Trotsky with its absence among the Americans, whose determination to keep Russia in the war missed the disillusionment with the war that had made the Bolshevik takeover possible. A second was their failure to see not only a distrustful regime but also an irreconcilably hostile ideology. A third, echoing American Diplomacy, was the irrelevance of Wilsonian idealism—particularly the Fourteen Points speech of January 1918—to the realities at hand. A fourth was the sheer confusion of the situation, no easy thing to reconstruct in retrospect. That, in turn, suggested that contrary to what Soviet propagandists had claimed ever since, U.S. policy had been too befuddled to have had any discernible effect on what was happening inside Russia at the time.

There was only one significantly sour review. It came from William Appleman Williams, then an obscure history professor at the University of Oregon, later the founder of American revisionist historiography on the origins and evolution of the Cold War. Russia Leaves the War was not serious history, Williams insisted, but rather an extended brief on behalf of Kennan’s former profession, the Foreign Service. He had used no new sources, his employment of existing ones was incomplete, and he said little about the “social philosophies” of the individuals he discussed “or their systems of accounting for—and anticipating—the relationship between cause and effect.” Williams himself would soon remedy this last omission: his dismissal of confusion as an influence on American foreign policy would spark debates among diplomatic historians for decades to come.¹¹

For the moment, though, Russia Leaves the War was a triumphant success—and, to Kennan’s astonishment, a prize-winner. “I can only hope that the judges were right,” he commented on accepting the National Book Award for nonfiction in March 1957. He apologized for taking a year and a half to write the book, as if this were somehow excessive. Having come to history thinking it would be easy, he now knew how difficult— but also how important—it was. For

[i]f we plod along with only the feeble lantern of our vision of contemporary events, unaided by history, we see—to be sure—a little of the path just under our feet; but the shadows are grotesque and misleading, the darkness closes in again behind us as we move along, and none can be sure of direction or of pace or of the trueness of action.

Only historians could confirm links between efforts and outcomes, providing the necessary corrective if, as Shakespeare had said—it was a favorite Kennan quotation—“we are to ‘dress ourselves fairly to our end.’ ”¹²

Two months later, just after finishing his second volume of almost five hundred pages—The Decision to Intervene, which carried his account only through July 1918—Kennan learned that Russia Leaves the War had won the Pulitzer Prize. By then it had also received the Bancroft and the Francis Parkman prizes. “I cannot believe that the book was that good,” he protested in his diary, “it must have been a dull year in the non-fiction field.” Still, the honors rewarded “a love of language and writing which never found any appreciable recognition in government . . . I now have the ability to be widely heard, on my own merits.” Deservedly or not, there was now “a rare possibility of usefulness,” to be “cherished and protected, wholly aside from its chance relation to my own person.”

And when, Link asked, would he finish his third volume? The first two had appeared, after all, under the series title “Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920.” “Oh, I’m never going to complete them,” Kennan replied, a bit too casually for Link, who devoted his entire career to Wilson’s life and papers. “Well, why did you write them?” “I wrote them to establish my credentials as a historian.”¹³

II.

Kennan did this in a way that vindicated, more thoroughly than either of them could have imagined, the risk