that there can be no possible middle ground or compromise between the two, that any attempts to find such a middle ground, by the resumption of diplomatic relations or otherwise, are bound to be unsuccessful, that the two systems cannot even exist together in the same world unless an economic cordon is put around one or the other of them, and that within twenty or thirty years either Russia will be capitalist or we shall be communist.
This was not, Kennan was careful to add, a judgment on the respective virtues of either ideology. It was simply to say that the two, like oil and water, could never mix. And if they ever came to blows, American liberals, “who now find the Soviets so pleasant, will be the first ones to be crushed in the clash.”53
But he soon abandoned this neutrality on ideology. He found himself developing to Volodya “certain ideas which I had not formerly known were in my own mind.” Communists, George now saw, combined “innate cowardice” and “intellectual insolence.” They had “abandoned the ship of western European civilization like a swarm of rats.” Having done so, they had grasped for a theory with which they could leap across the gulf through which the rest of mankind had been foundering. They “credited their own intelligence with powers far greater than those of all previous generations.” They regarded their forefathers, and most of their contemporaries, as “hopeless fools.”
This struck George, “not a religious man,” as a form of “cultural and intellectual sacrilege.” Maybe communism would work as a purely Russian phenomenon. For the West, though, it could only mean retrogression, and that required resistance. “Was it for us to stand aside and stop fighting because things were going against us? Did a football player leave the field when the score turned against his team? Did a real soldier stand anxiously watching the tide of battle, in order to decide whether or not to fight?” There were principles of decency in individual conduct which offered hope for the human race. They required defense, not abandonment just because they were in danger. It was a stirring rejection of realism, as George himself recognized: “Enter Kennan, the moralist.”54
With all that was going on, he wrote Jeanette, it seemed almost criminal to complain about his own situation: “A young man of twenty-six, with fundamentally good health, tolerable appearance, plenty of money, an incomparably advantageous official position, an active mind and an adaptability to every known form of culture, and a knowledge of English, French, German and Russian, has no right to be bored in the very vortex of the most intense intellectual and cultural currents of the world.”
And yet he was bored: a raucous Christmas with American friends in Riga left him despairing of accomplishing anything “until I bring some peace and order into my private life.” If he were a private citizen, he could “become a Boheme and attempt to think.” Being a Foreign Service officer, he could only choose “between marriage and stupidity on the one hand, and nervous exhaustion, boldness and futility on the other.” He would seek the first, “as soon as I can.” But “I shall never be completely happy at it, for I shall never be able to do much thinking myself— and I have been just clever enough, in my youth, to mistrust everyone who tries to think for me.”
By April he was losing patience with Volodya, who was failing to keep appointments, patronizing “hermaphrodite” dance performances, and taking opium—although George was still lending the Kozhenikovs money. “Essentially,” he explained to Jeanette, “it is nothing more or less than my puritan origins rising in relentless revolt against the non-puritan influences of the last few years.” So what would happen? “Perhaps I’ ll get religion. Perhaps I’ ll fall in love, for the first time in my young life. Or perhaps I’ll get broken on the wheel, like Hemingway and others of the expatriates.” One thing was clear: “Prolonged and intimate association with the devil does not lie in the Kennan character.” Perhaps the tale should be titled “The story of the man who tried to sell his soul and couldn’t.”55
Three months after writing this last letter, Kennan wrote another to the secretary of state in Washington, using the formal language in which he had been trained: “Sir: . . . I should like to request that I be allowed to take 6 weeks leave of absence beginning approximately August 10, 1931.” He had been in poor health for some time and needed several weeks of complete rest in order to get back into shape. “Furthermore, I am expecting to be married.”56
FOUR
Marriage—and Moscow: 1931–1933
“COME RIGHT ON. LOVE, ANNELISE.” THE TELEGRAM FROM KRISTIANSAND reached George in Berlin on August 5, 1931. Three days later he boarded a ship that would take him—along with his elegant but unreliable Nash roadster—on the first leg of a journey to Norway. Volodya Kozhenikov and his sister Shura came to Stettin to see him off, laden with flowers they could ill afford: “They take it very seriously, this departure,” their benefactor wrote in his diary. “Instinct . . . tells them that while we may meet again soon, this day and this departure mark the termination of my residence in Berlin and that this is the real good-bye.” He assured Jeanette, though, that “I am very happy, and am entering marriage with none of the qualms which I understand to be usually attendant upon this stage of development.”1
Anna Elisabeth Sorensen, who had just turned twenty-one, had only a few qualms herself. “I am afraid you will have to be very patient in bringing me up to be an American girl,” she wrote from Kristiansand, “they are all so clever, in all directions.” She was, however, sure of herself. “I am glad I came here to think things over, but even here I miss you every minute.... Just can’t help it.... I know you understand me as I understand you.” She had shared news of the engagement with her astonished mother, who would need time to get used to the idea. “Have not had opportunity to tell daddy yet. I am curious to know what he will say.” She had, however, let a former boyfriend know: it was strange that “when people lose a thing they realise how much they liked it.”2
Annelise was born on July 23, 1910, in Kristiansand, where her father, Einar Haakon Sorensen, ran a building materials business. In a country facing the sea young people were expected to leave home, and at the age of seventeen Annelise went to Paris to study language, literature, and history. She had already learned English and, after several more months of tutoring, was speaking it well. There had been talk of becoming a doctor, but “I knew myself well enough to know that I didn’t have seven years in me just to study.” She expected to marry before that.3
After more schooling in Kristiansand, Annelise went to Berlin, “ostensibly to learn German.” It was there that she encountered George Kennan, at a Sunday lunch arranged by a cousin who had hoped to rent him an apartment: the date was March 22, 1931. The plan succeeded, and that allowed them to meet from time to time at parties. George struck Annelise as “rather serious.” On one early date, he brooded about America. “It was hardly the kind of thing that you’d think you would sit and talk to a young girl about—your worries about a country which I had never been to.” They decided to marry after only a few weeks, a fact Annelise kept from her parents. Even so, “they were not pleased.” But she was determined. “I finally just put my foot down and said that if I heard another sigh from my mother, I was going to scream!”4
George left for Kristiansand exhausted from overwork: Annelise had asked him to try to get there “without the black rings around your eyes!” He had planned to rest for a few days in Copenhagen, but the Nash needed work and he caught a cold. He left there “a complete wreck.” Sitting miserably in the driver’s seat of his car, which was lashed to the deck, he nursed his fever by reading Tolstoy until the islands of the Norwegian coast came into view. George later wondered what impression “the thin, slightly uncouth, very nervous, and rather unwell apparition of an
