Somehow in that city, “where I have never lived, there has nevertheless by some strange quirk of fate—a previous life, perhaps?—been deposited a portion of my own capacity to feel and to love, a portion—in other words—of my own life.”
From Leningrad, the trip was by train across former Finnish territory where the war had left few buildings standing. The gulls wheeling overhead mocked ruins below; healthy vegetation concealed land mines. At the new border, everything changed. There was a new station, simple, clean, and in good repair. Newspapers were on sale at a freshly painted kiosk. A fat, sleek horse pulled a peasant cart “with a happy briskness which no Russian horse possesses.” Sidings were full of freight cars hauling neatly packed war reparations east, leading Kennan to wonder whether these might induce “pangs of shame among the inhabitants of the great shoddy Russian world into which they were moving. But on second thought I was inclined to doubt this very strongly.”
The Finnish locomotive at last arrived, coupled onto the cars, and started off at a speed that seemed “positively giddy after the leisurely lumbering of Russian trains.” A diner offered good if scanty food. The other passengers were friendly and unafraid. The scene suggested “the efficiency, the trimness, the quietness and the boredom of bourgeois civilization; and these qualities smote with triple effect on the senses of a traveler long since removed from the impressions of [a] bourgeois environment.”10
The youthful Kennan had, from time to time, shown a certain disdain for that environment. Part of the fascination of Weimar Berlin—even more so of the Soviet Union when he first arrived there—had been that some other society seemed under construction, however harshly, inefficiently, and idealistically. Siberia still offered hints of that, but Stalinism had long since smothered such experimentation in the rest of Russia, leaving only a depressing seediness. The Finnsky Dom, hence, had been a relief after the Mokhovaya: seediness wears one out. And now Finland itself—a bourgeois horizon lying just across the Karelian isthmus—took on an almost mystical appeal, as it would for so many other foreigners in the U.S.S.R. over so many years.11 It was time to leave—but that did not happen quite yet.
II.
“Dear Averell,” Kennan had written while Harriman was still at Potsdam in July: “Gibbon stated in the ‘Decline and Fall’ that the happiest times in the lives of peoples were those about which no history was written.” Moscow was quiet, with only the usual annoyances over staffing, housing, and courier services. “Compared to the questions you [are] discussing, . . . these problems seem small.”12 Perhaps so, but Kennan by then was beyond seeing anything as insignificant. His dispatches to Washington—on matters large and small—continued to be filled with portents of trouble to come.
An agreement between Soviet and Polish tourist agencies would restrict the free travel and residence of foreigners. A visiting journalist’s sympathetic newspaper story revealed how the cultivation of novices could undercut the reporting of professionals. The Kremlin would regard any withdrawal of American troops from western Czechoslovakia—which they had occupied at the end of the war—as a sign of weakness, despite wartime agreements that had assigned that territory to the Red Army. Soviet requests for postwar economic assistance were meant to sustain wartime levels of arms production. An Anglo-French plan to consult Moscow on the future of Tangier would provoke “a colorful revolutionary pronunciamento denouncing all interference in Morocco by great powers and calling on Moroccan proletariat to arise and eject them.”13
This last warning reflected a larger concern: that the international communist movement—which Stalin had appeared to disavow when he abolished the Comintern in 1943—remained in place and subject to his authority. Paris was the operational center for the European democracies, as were Cuba and Mexico for Latin America. The West had yet to grasp that some of its own citizens could be trained, like pets, “to heel without being on the leash.” To be sure, managing this network required finding the “almost imperceptible line which divides fancied independence of political action from the real thing.” But Soviet leaders had a great deal of experience in doing that.14
On August 8, 1945, with Harriman back in Moscow, Kennan accompanied him to the Kremlin for a meeting with Stalin. Despite his short stature, scrawny mustache, discolored teeth, pocked face, and yellow eyes, the “Generalissimus,” as he now styled himself, struck Kennan as having “a certain rough handsomeness,” like “an old battle-scarred tiger.”
In manner—with us, at least—he was simple, quiet, unassuming. There was no striving for effect. His words were few. They generally sounded reasonable and sensible; indeed they often were. An unforewarned visitor would never have guessed what depths of calculation, ambition, love of power, jealousy, cruelty, and sly vindictiveness lurked behind this unpretentious facade.
The subject that day was the Soviet Union’s declaration of war against Japan, with Harriman expressing pleasure at being once again allies. There was no avoiding the implications of the American atomic bomb, however, used two days earlier at Hiroshima. It must have been “a very difficult problem to work out,” Stalin acknowledged, and “very expensive.” It would bring victory quickly, and it would mean “the end of war and of aggressors. But the secret would have to be well kept.”15
Kennan could not have agreed more, except that it was the Soviets from whom he wanted to keep the secret. “My first reaction was: ‘Oh God, if we’ve got something like this, let’s be sure that the Stalin regime doesn’t get it.’ ” He warned Harriman that “it would be a tragic folly for us to hand over the secrets of atomic energy production to the Russians.” More formally, he cautioned the new secretary of state, James F. Byrnes:
There is nothing—I repeat nothing—in the history of the Soviet regime which could justify us in assuming that the men who are now in power in Russia, or even those who have chances of assuming power within the foreseeable future, would hesitate for a moment to apply this power against us if by doing so they thought that they might materially improve their own power position in the world.
It was, thus, “my profound conviction that to reveal to the Soviet Government any knowledge which might be vital to the defense of the United States, without adequate guaranties for the control of its use in the Soviet Union, would constitute a frivolous neglect of the vital interests of our people.” Unusually, Kennan asked that the State Department make his view “a matter of record,” and to see that it was considered in “any discussions of this subject which may take place in responsible circles of our Government.”16
The Generalissimus, in the meantime, had paid Kennan a compliment. The occasion was the congressional visit in mid-September. To Kennan’s surprise, Stalin agreed to see the American legislators, probably with the hope of speeding action on a $6 billion postwar reconstruction loan Molotov had requested the previous January. With Harriman away again, it fell to Kennan to escort the delegation to the Kremlin, and to serve as interpreter. Several members arrived tipsy from having enjoyed “tea” somewhere in the Moscow subway, and just before entering Stalin’s office one asked: “What if I biff the old codger one in the nose?”
My heart froze. I cannot recall what I said, but I am sure that never in my life did I speak with greater earnestness. I had, as I recollect it, the help of some of the more sober members of the party, [and] our companion came meekly along. He sat . . . at the end of a long table, facing Stalin, and did nothing more disturbing than to leer and wink once or twice at the bewildered dictator, thus making it possible for the invisible gun muzzles, with which the room was no doubt studded, to remain sullenly silent.
Oblivious to this near-disaster, Stalin greeted his visitors politely and at the end of the meeting went out of his way to praise Kennan—with whose views espionage had already familiarized him—for the excellence of his Russian.
