Dawson played the critical role. The State Department, he pointed out, would finance three years of graduate study at a European university if Kennan would seek proficiency in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Russian. Despite the absence of formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, Kennan chose Russian, supposing that there would someday again be official Americans there. “But I also had a mind to the family tradition established by the elder George Kennan.” And so on March 29, three days after his despairing farewell to Washington, the younger George was accepted into a new Foreign Service program for “language assignments” in “Eastern Europe.”27
The last American ambassador to Russia, David R. Francis, had left that country in November 1918, a year after Vladimir Ilich Lenin had seized power. The last Russian ambassador to the United States, Boris Bakhmeteff, represented the Provisional Government that Lenin had overthrown: he finally resigned in 1923, leaving the embassy on Sixteenth Street dark. By that time Woodrow Wilson’s last secretary of state, Bainbridge Colby, had announced the policy of the U.S. government toward the new regime in Moscow: that it was not possible to maintain diplomatic relations with a government “based upon the negation of every principle . . . upon which it is possible to base harmonious and trustful relations, whether of nations or of individuals.”28
Nevertheless, American contacts with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics flourished. Despite the revolutionary aspirations of the first state in history to be run by a communist party, the United States sent desperately needed famine relief in 1921–22, and prominent businessmen—among them Henry Ford and the young W. Averell Harriman—quickly found opportunities for trade and investment. By 1930 the Soviet Union imported more from the United States than from any other country: the staunchly Republican senator William Borah described it as “the greatest undeveloped market in the world.”29
The absence of diplomatic relations, therefore, became increasingly difficult to justify. Within the State Department there was deep hostility toward the Soviet Union and the international communist movement; but there was also the sense that nonrecognition could not last indefinitely, and that there ought to be experts in place when that policy shift took place. Russian studies became a priority, and in 1927 Robert F. Kelley, the new and energetic chief of the Division of Eastern European Affairs, began recruiting Foreign Service officers from its “unclassified” ranks for that purpose. This was the program Dawson recommended to Kennan, and it was one of the things that persuaded him—the breakup with Eleanor was surely another—to rescind his resignation. A career-minded guardian angel had again appeared on the scene, and as Kennan would say in his memoirs, “I have always been grateful.”30
IV.
Officers selected for the program were first sent to perform consular duties in the region in which they were to specialize: only after a probationary period would they begin the promised postgraduate study. Kennan’s assignment was Tallinn, in Estonia, one of the three Baltic republics that had broken away from the Russian empire after its demise. As had been the case the previous year, though, he was temporarily diverted, this time to Berlin, a city Kennan had visited briefly in the summer of 1926 after passing the Foreign Service examinations. If his diary entries are any indication, his mood had brightened somewhat: “I walk to work in the morning,” he wrote soon after arriving, “and delight in the Berlin of the young day.”31
There was, to be sure, the tedium of passports, visas, and accounts, but there were also receptions to attend and interesting people to watch: Berlin, the largest and liveliest city in Germany, was no backwater post. At one such event the German foreign secretary Gustav Stresemann held forth, “swaying his portly figure back and forth as he talks . . . One wonders at the secrets of Europe which must lie within that broad, shaven head.” Should a man with such responsibilities laugh and joke? More pitiful were the Russian emigres. “Alive they are,” but “they move like lost phantoms in a world which is, and always will be, a distorted and gilded memory of the past.” Meanwhile, at the communist theater, capitalists strutted around in top hats, brutal soldiers martyred proletarians, musicians played the “Internationale,” and individuals offstage provided the mighty voice of the oppressed masses. It was all “doctrinaire tommy-rot,” but under it “one feels the heat of a brightly burning flame.”32
Crowded buses full of tired people passed beneath the Brandenburg Gate, where Napoleon’s army had once marched: what was the bond between that day and this? Along the Wannsee, on a brilliant Sunday, people “ride, boat, walk, eat, wander, buy, stare, and make love,” before returning, sunburned, to the city’s slavery. Communists and nationalists competed in noisy political demonstrations, but more impressive were the less pretentious Social Democrats, who had unwittingly carried “the idealism of the German character through the horrors of war and revolution and economic collapse.”33
George soon fell in love with one of them. Her name was Charlotte Bohm, and her story—which he sent to Jeanette—reflected what had happened to Germany in recent years. She had grown up in Berlin, the daughter of a businessman, and in 1914 had watched her brother march off to a war in which “it seemed that men had become gods and participated in incredible, awe-inspiring adventures.” But one night the boy’s guitar inexplicably fell off the wall. Charlotte’s mother knew instantly that “
Of course he didn’t. Impoverished by war and inflation, her mother gave up her apartment and moved to the country. Charlotte became a secretary, had love affairs that did not last, and “slowly the girlishness went out of her face,” to be replaced by the signs of “a joyless, purposeless, solitary existence.” That was how she was when he met her. Charlotte “literally blossomed out during the time we were together; it was like a rebirth.” But he could not marry her, he had to go to Tallinn, and now “all that I had accomplished is undone again.” This was why, George explained to Jeanette, “it is hard to live in Europe and see things of this sort and then come home and feel boundless optimism in perpetual prosperity and the general righteousness of things.” It was also “why I am probably always going to be considerable of a radical.”34
V.
June 1928. “The attractiveness of a blond German girl [not Charlotte] sitting beside me [on a train] is heightened almost unbearably by the fact that she pays no attention to me. I wish to hell Sherman [a friend] were not so drunk. He keeps starting to whistle, whereupon I look up from my Russian grammar in a startled fashion.” Despite the fact that he was not to begin language training for another year, George used his time in Berlin to master the Russian alphabet and to begin learning—whatever the distractions—the rudiments of grammar. By mid- July he was in Tallinn serving as the second and very junior member of the two-person American diplomatic and consular office there. A single minister represented the United States in all three Baltic republics, but he operated chiefly out of Riga, in Latvia, with only occasional visits to Estonia and Lithuania. Kennan’s work in Tallinn was varied and at times amusing: “I rather loved it.”35 But the real excitement was that the Baltic states were as close to the Soviet Union as it was possible to get without going there—an opportunity open to most Americans at the time but not, paradoxically, to the Foreign Service’s young “experts” on that country, the existence of which their government had not yet officially recognized.
The Riga legation was the principal American “listening post” for Soviet affairs, just as Hong Kong would be during the 1950s and 1960s prior to the establishment of diplomatic contacts with the People’s Republic of China. Kennan was not yet entrusted with such responsibilities, but he used his free time in Tallinn—of which there was plenty—to prepare himself for them. He hired a Ukrainian tutor who knew no English, and between them they studied Russian as best they could, unable to communicate in any other language. They used first-grade readers, and it was from these “that I conceived . . . a love for this great Russian language—rich, pithy, musical, sometimes
