bargains were struck; passengers pushed their way triumphantly back to the cars, clutching their acquisitions; and timid little girls with bare feet, who had not succeeded in selling their offerings, stood by in sad and tearless patience, awaiting with all the stoicism of their race the maternal wrath which would await them when the train had gone and they would return home with their tidbits unsold.
At one stop a soldier accused an old woman of cheating him. “‘You’d better be careful, little mother,’ he said gaily, ‘not to run across me in the other world. The archangels are all my friends.’ To the crowd’s delight, the old girl crossed herself anxiously; and the incident ended in general laughter.”
The trip took four days. Fellow passengers were pleasant but wary: “We didn’t talk much.” One evening, however, Kennan passed around copies of the American embassy’s Russian-language magazine, provoking a lively corridor discussion on the transition from Roosevelt to Truman. “Then everybody began to look guiltily over his shoulder and the meeting quickly dispersed.” With traffic on the line heavy,
we were only one link in the long chain of trains, tiny trains against the surrounding distances, crawling eastward like worms, haltingly and with innumerable interruptions. . . . We stopped more than we moved; and when we stopped, we could see the freight trains piling up behind us, and hear them whistling for the right of way with the deep throaty voice which only trains in Russia and America have, and which brings nostalgia to every American heart.
The waits were long enough for the passengers to get off and pick flowers: at one point, “when the train stopped among the swamps, we climbed down the embankment, took off our shirts, splashed off the yellow scum from the surface . . . , and washed our heads in the cool dark liquid from underneath.” Toward Novosibirsk, the prairie became “completely flat, treeless, shrouded in streaks of ground-mist; and the dome of the sky stretched out to tremendous distances, as though vainly trying to encompass the limits of the great plain.”
Kennan arrived weary, wilted, and without an appetite after ninety-eight hours on the train, to be greeted with the usual Russian dinner accorded visiting dignitaries. It included of course vodka, as well as “river fish, salmon, cold meat, radishes, cucumbers, cheese, hard boiled eggs, bread and butter, soup, beer, steak, fried potatoes, fried eggs, cake, and tea.” Each refusal was “an indication that the respective dish was not good enough,” which served only “to stimulate my host and the waitress to new feats of hospitality.” Upon recovering, Kennan felt well enough to inspect an airplane factory and an experimental farm, to attend a football match, the circus, and the Jewish theater—evacuated from Minsk early in the war, and “still playing on odd nights in Yiddish to a full house”—and to take in an opera in an enormous new theater, the largest in the Soviet Union, for which the funds had been raised locally, in wartime, with the streets surrounding it “still those of a Siberian village.” There could be “no more flamboyant a repudiation of the past, no more arrogant expression of confidence in the future, than the erection of this almost mystical structure on the remote banks of the Ob.”
After several days Kennan continued by train to Stalinsk-Kuznetsk, a city that fifteen years earlier had been a swamp. It now contained thousands of workers and their families, as well as one of the largest steel mills in the Soviet Union. Obviously it had required “a great feat of willpower and organization to build and put into operation at all an establishment of this size in a place so remote from the other industrial centers.” Perhaps the sacrifices had been worth it if the plant had helped to win the war, but it had clearly cost far more to build and to operate than a comparable facility in the United States. State-sanctioned “labor unions” placed production ahead of the safety, health, and welfare of the workers. A nearby collective farm provided the state with a reliable supply of agricultural commodities, but its peasants seemed “as effectively bound to their place of work as were the Russian serfs of the period before emancipation.”
Banquets continued to be a challenge. “I am having an extremely interesting and enjoyable trip,” George wrote Jeanette on a postcard he mailed from Stalinsk-Kuznetsk. “I am constantly reminded here of G. K. the elder and his travels. Fortunately for me, I have none of his physical hardships to cope with; but I face a culinary hospitality before which I think even he, in the end, would have wavered.” The police, if curious about the identity of “G. K.,” failed to pursue the matter, and the card made it safely to Highland Park.
Back in Novosibirsk on a hot day, Kennan suggested to one of his handlers that they take a swim. They chose the river, surely a site known to the first George Kennan, but now with the great railroad bridge and the gigantic opera house looming in the distance. Still, “[l]ittle naked boys poked along the shore in a leaky old row boat as boys will do everywhere.” The scene led Kennan to wonder whether Russian dreams of grandeur would not at some point “cut loose from all connection with reality and begin some fantastic colossus of a project, build part of it hastily and with bad materials, never to finish it, and then leave the beginnings to rot away or be used for utterly incongruous purposes.” If so, the Ob would remain, flowing quietly toward the Arctic Ocean. “And probably, regardless of what marvels had or had not been constructed on shore, for countless summers naked little boys would continue to find leaky old boats and to pole their way up and down the stream . . . , shouting and splashing, cutting their feet on the rocks, and making astounding discoveries about the nature of rivers and the contents of river bottoms.”
Kennan returned to Moscow by air, a trip that itself required three days, several stops, and considerable improvisation. On the flight to Omsk, an illiterate old woman regaled him with observations on life reflecting “all the pungency and charm of the mental world of those who had never known the printed word.” Kennan shared his lunch with her under the tail of the plane after they landed, began reading Tolstoy aloud, and soon had half of their fellow passengers as an audience. Stuck overnight in Sverdlovsk with no continuing flight scheduled, Kennan watched gratefully as the local party secretary, shouting loudly over the phone, commandeered one. In Kazan, the police for once lost track of him, allowing Kennan the “pleasant and homelike, if slightly vulgar” experience of “sauntering on the streets of a Volga River town of a summer evening,” philosophically eating sunflower seeds and spitting out their husks. It provided “the same sense of bovine calm and superiority as chewing gum. For a moment I could almost forget that I was a foreigner in a country governed by people suspicious and resentful of all foreigners. But not for long.”
Flying to Moscow the next day, Kennan sat on a crate, looked out the window, and tried “to gather together into some sort of pattern the mass of impressions which the past fortnight had left upon me.” The Russians, he concluded, were “a talented, responsive people, capable of absorbing and enriching all forms of human experience.” They were “strangely tolerant of cruelty and carelessness yet highly conscious of ethical values.” They had emerged from the war “profoundly confident that they are destined to play a progressive and beneficial role in the affairs of the world, and eager to begin to do so.” How could Americans not sympathize with them?
Their government, however, was “a regime of unparalleled ruthlessness and jealousy, . . . determined that no outside influence shall touch them.” As long as it was in place, outsiders could do little. Generosity would only strengthen it. Blows aimed at it would excuse further repression. The wise American, therefore, would try neither to help nor to harm but instead to “make plain to Soviet acquaintances the minimum conditions on which he can envisage polite neighborly relations with them, the character of his own aspirations and the limits of his own patience.” He would then “leave the Russian people—unencumbered by foreign sentimentality as by foreign antagonism—to work out their own destiny in their own peculiar way.”50
TEN
A Very Long Telegram: 1945–1946
