establishment operated without codes, safes, security, couriers, or even at first an office. Contrary to Bullitt’s expectations, it had no access to the highest authorities: instead it dealt with a ponderously inefficient bureaucracy, the respective parts of which usually did not connect. “Nevertheless,” Kennan recalled, “I felt that we, with our absence of bureaucracy, accomplished more in a few weeks than did the full embassy staff, when it arrived, over the first year of its existence.”5
“All this had to be done,” George wrote his cousin Charlie James, “in a place which has the world’s craziest financial system,” on behalf of a government—his own—“which has the world’s craziest system of expenditure control.” The State Department provided only minimal instructions, so Kennan meticulously documented every meeting, phone call, and disbursement of funds. He was attempting to master Soviet laws on insurance—such as they were—translating tortuously worded contracts, juggling the intricacies of currency exchange, assigning space in the still-uncompleted Mokhovaya, urging the eviction of Spaso’s recalcitrant tenants, even bargaining on hotel rates for the incoming staff. The manager of the National agreed with Kennan that any Western European establishment would happily give official Americans a 25 percent discount, but that was because “the capitalist world had an economic crisis and Soviet Russia did not.”
Kennan was also becoming an expert on menu planning, interior decorating, trade promotion, tourism, emigration, marriage counseling, and mortuary science. He spent hours one day trying to explain the concept of a “quick lunch” to the kitchen staff at the Savoy Hotel, where the Americans had relocated because the National would not budge on its room rates: he could provide recipes for “light, simple dishes,” to be prepared “at very low cost.” With his assistants, Kennan was measuring the rooms in Spaso House for rugs and draperies, while trying to meet the demands of Americans already in the Soviet Union who had hitherto lacked an embassy to which to turn: there were export-hungry businessmen, tourists with lost passports, requests for help with exit visas, questions about divorce proceedings, and in one instance the dilemma of whether to disinter and photograph a corpse in Chelyabinsk in order to persuade its widow in Wisconsin that it indeed had expired.
On the night before Bullitt’s return, it fell to Kennan, Thayer, and Merrill to wrestle the ambassador’s bed up the grand staircase at Spaso. They also had to tell him that, for several more months until the Mokhovaya was ready, his residence would double as the embassy chancery. Bullitt was “steaming with fury.” There were evenings, Kennan remembered, when he and the other official Americans in Moscow, “assembled in my hotel room, gloomily sipping our highballs and watching the mice play hide-and-seek along the base-boards,” were on the verge of admitting defeat, fearing that they would soon have to “give it up and sneak shame-facedly away, the laughing- stock of Europe.”6
“The honeymoon atmosphere had evaporated completely,” Bullitt reported to Roosevelt a few weeks after his arrival back in Moscow on March 7. The Soviets’ hostility toward all capitalist countries, muffled during the negotiations leading to recognition, was now coming out. The only way to deal with them would be to offer carrots but to make it clear that if these were refused, “they will receive the club on the behind.” The embassy staff was the only “bright spot in the murky sky. . . . I am delighted with every man.”7
They were impressive. Loy Henderson, who went with Bullitt to Moscow as second secretary, understood that he wanted “dash, brilliance, imagination and enthusiasm,” and this he got. For in addition to Kennan and Henderson, the embassy now had three other Foreign Service officers whose careers would shape Soviet-American relations well into the Cold War. One was Elbridge Durbrow, who followed Soviet economic affairs and would serve with Kennan again in Moscow during the mid-1940s. A second was Bertel E. Kuniholm, a Kelley protege who had studied Russian in Paris, and would later report on Soviet activities in Iran. A third, Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen, also trained with Kelley, became Kennan’s closest colleague, and would succeed him as ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1953. “In numberless verbal encounters, then and over ensuing decades,” Kennan recalled, “our agreements and differences would be sternly and ruthlessly talked out, sometimes with a heat so white that casual bystanders would conclude we had broken for life.” But “no friendship has ever meant more to me than his.”8
Those debates started in Moscow, and Annelise witnessed them. Because of the housing shortage, Bullitt had initially prohibited wives from accompanying his staff, but she was already there and in much demand. She found the life exhilarating : “We were young, and gay; we danced all night; but we would also talk all night.” Like the other Americans, the Kennans now had a room at the Savoy, where almost everyone was cooking on the hot plates Annelise had pioneered—when the electricity worked. Telephones functioned erratically, often with only labored breathing at the other end. Owing to ill-conceived State Department economy measures, there was no embassy automobile, so Intourist provided chauffeured Lincolns at rates that Kennan believed soon would have paid for one. With taxis scarce, the only alternative was motorcycles: Annelise recalled riding to one dinner in the sidecar dressed in a long formal gown, while George, in white tie, hung on precariously behind the driver. But the other embassies threw great parties, and as Durbrow recalled decades later: “You made better and closer friends in Moscow than any post I’ve ever heard about or been in.”9
There were also opportunities for George—within the limits the secret police allowed—to begin to feel himself Russian. “Just to ride on a street-car, if you can understand the conversation, is an experience,” he wrote Jeanette. One Sunday in May, with summer having suddenly arrived, the Kennans and several friends picnicked as close as they could get to Stalin’s dacha. “[W]e did not see the big boy,” but skirting the walls of his estate, they found a bluff overlooking the Moscow River filled with families making themselves at home, “with all the delightful informality which is the charm of the Russian countryside.” Security men appeared, “asked where we ‘citizens’ might be from and what we were doing there, and subsided from view just as abruptly upon learning that we were not ‘citizens’ at all, but only a bunch of bourgeois from the American Embassy.”10
From such daytime excursions and late-night discussions, Kennan gained some preliminary impressions of the Soviet experiment. He expressed these most clearly in a handwritten letter, sent by diplomatic courier, for his sister’s eyes only:
I find myself continually torn between sympathy for a nation which, within the limitations of its own character and an imported dogma, is trying to reconstruct its life on a basis finer and sounder than that of any other country anywhere, and disgust with the bigotry and arrogance of its leaders, who not only refuse to recognize their own mistakes and limitations but pretend that they have found the solution of all the problems of the rest of the world in their crude interpretation of a worn-out doctrine.
“I realize,” George admitted, “that no revolution is entirely discriminate, or ever could be, but it could, at least, make its aim an intelligent discrimination.” He would prefer one that “would raise the best elements of society—and not the worst—out of the futility and tragedy which unfortunately surrounds their existence. And this is the sort of revolution which Moscow has not got to offer!”11
Meanwhile Bullitt was worrying about the physical toll Moscow life was taking on his staff. There was, he advised the State Department, a form of acute indigestion, caused by the excessive use of canned food, that mimicked the symptoms of angina pectoris. One of his subordinates had already suffered such an attack. Russian cuisine was no solution, for even when “obtained at great expense in the best hotels, [it] produces digestive upsets dignified by purple blotches.” If his young men were to stay healthy, they would need more frequent leaves than the department normally provided. 12
The afflicted staff member was Kennan, who had been on duty in Moscow longer than anyone else. Leave was accordingly granted, allowing George a few days in Leningrad for the first time, while Annelise remained behind to set up the Mokhovaya apartment, into which they were finally now able to move. Peter the Great’s capital, George wrote Jeanette, had been erected atop the poverty and suffering that Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov had
