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 tender, sometimes earthy and brutal, sometimes classically severe—that was . . . an unfailing source of strength and reassurance in the drearier and more trying reaches of later life.”36
Kennan’s fluency became sufficient that he could spend Christmas at the remote fifteenth-century monastery of Pskovo-Pechorsky, then located on the Estonian side of the Soviet border. “I damn near died of hunger, because these monks didn’t have anything to eat, except barrels of salted herring and black bread. [But] they were nice to me.” In Narva, farther north, he found equally ugly Orthodox and Lutheran churches glowering over the miserable huts that surrounded them: a clash of Russian and Scandinavian cultures. The same was evident in Helsinki, a strikingly more modern city than Tallinn, where within the magnificent new railroad station stood “the box-like passenger cars of the old Russian railway system, with their crazy, chimney-like ventilators protruding from their roofs,” a reminder that “for hundreds of miles beyond there stretches the bleak melancholy expanse of northern Russia . . . ageless . . . unconquerable.”37
While trying to fathom what lay to the east, Kennan brooded about Europe’s fragility and his own superficiality. “Americanism, like Bolshevism, is a disease which gains footing only in a weakened body,” he concluded with youthful certainty. “If the Old World has no longer sufficient vitality, economic and cultural, to oppose these new barbarian invasions, it will have to drown in the flood, as civilizations have drowned before it.” The only escape lay “in depth rather than breadth,” for in a world in which anyone with health and persistence could travel anywhere, the only unexplored territory lay “deep[e]r down in our own selves, about which we know everything, and understand nothing.” That was a lofty way of addressing a lower problem: George’s own self-absorption, from which flowed intellectual accomplishment and—increasingly—the ability to write compelling prose, but also still behavior echoing “my neurotic student youth.”38
There was, for example, the August weekend he spent at the dacha of Harry Carlson, the American consul in Tallinn and his only immediate superior. He began it in a bad humor: “I hate the world, and the world hates me.” While sharing a train compartment with a British officer who had also been invited, they quickly decided that they disliked each other and needed to make no effort to conceal the fact. Their host was well-meaning, earnest, and nervous, yet what right did he have to “force on me” his “timorous, middle-class standards?” George sulked through dinner, refused to play bridge, and woke the next morning “stuffy and bilious.” Sensing this, Mrs. Carlson suggested “that I amuse myself as I see fit.” So he hired a boat and set off rowing vigorously across the bay against the wind: after a while, with blistered hands, it was time to turn back. Upon his arrival, however, the British officer proposed a paddle-boat outing, during which both were drenched by a large wave. But both were stubborn. “He is not going to complain, and [n]either am I.” So they grimly made their way to the other side and back, chilled, soaked, aching, and miserable. Aware at once that he had not been a good guest, George remorsefully recorded the details of the unhappy weekend. Long afterward he would remember his bad manners as having merited “the general ostracism I received thenceforth in the little diplomatic-consular community.”39
Kennan moved to a larger community—the Riga legation—early in 1929. That city resembled, as none other did, prerevolutionary St. Petersburg: “The copy had survived the original.” He also had colleagues now whose job it was to watch the Soviet Union. He listened carefully to their endless arguments “rising and falling with the hours.” He was not in the “Russian Section,” but his reports—mostly on Baltic issues—were winning respect. Four days after George’s twenty-fifth birthday, a visiting State Department inspector noted that
Mr. Kennan . . . studies well all of his subjects and treats them intelligently, comprehensively and at times almost with brilliance,—certainly with flashes that indicate considerable promise as to his development into a reporting officer of considerable ability. He has assurance, a far-seeing eye, follows details unerringly and is usually on the lookout for anything that may turn up. His alertness is commendable, [but] his assurance may, until mellowed by further experience, lead him afield.40
There were few signs now of the petulance Kennan had displayed in Tallinn. He still patronized elders, but in the company of youthful contemporaries, and with self-critical empathy.
“Poor M——,” he wrote in his diary of an older colleague who was leaving Riga, “always dignified even in his weakness, and now we assemble on this winter night, to bid him farewell.” Each shook M——by the hand, talking volubly “to conceal our uneasiness,” trying to “make him feel that we like him, that we are sorry to see him go.” But the train stood still, and the minutes dragged on. “We are not accustomed to playing the part of solemnity for more than a few moments.” Suddenly the train started to move. “Like a group of hysterical children, we laugh, we shout ‘Hurry up, M——, hurry up,’ and we push him to the door of the car.” Standing there, “waving his arm, smiling his sad, courteous smile, M——disappears and leaves us . . . , a trifle embarrassed to find ourselves all together at this late hour, waving senselessly at the black emptiness of the Baltic night.”41
Kennan’s diaries were not available to the inspector from Washington, but his comments about alertness to detail, promising “flashes,” occasional “brilliance,”
and a “far-seeing eye” could well have characterized the writing George was now regularly doing in his spare time:
Riga, February 2, 1929: A furtive, fitful wind, smelling of dirty snow, and deserted wharves, sneaks in from the harbor. It rushes aimlessly through the empty streets, muttering and sighing to itself, seeking it knows not what, crazed and desperate, like a drunken man, lost in the dawn.
Dorpat (Tartu), Estonia, March 29: From the sight of these drab peasants, staring at the ikons, crossing themselves, shuffling the balsam twigs under their feet, as they wait for the commencement of the service, on[e] can sense the full necessity for their presence here.... They do not understand the service, but they see the gilt and the robes and the candles; they hear the chanting and the singing; and they go away with the comforting feeling of there being a world . . . somewhere and somehow . . . less ugly than their own.
Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, April 9: Threads of Fate, leading to all parts of Europe and America, are responsible for the fact that this scrawny Jewish village lying by its frozen river in the morning sun, may call itself the capital of the muddy, impoverished country-side which stretches out around it. It has accepted [this] . . . as a hungry animal accepts an unexpected meal. When the tide of fortune turns, when the officials and diplomats go away, leaving the government buildings as empty as the shops of the little Jewish merchants, there will be snarling and recrimination, but there will be no real sadness, for there has been no real hope.
But why this profusion of extracurricular prose? Maybe to practice observation, a useful skill in a diplomat. Probably in imitation of the German journalist, poet, and playwright Alfons Paquet, whose travel writings had made a deep impression on Kennan. Certainly out of an extraordinary sensitivity to landscapes, environments, and moods, in a way that he found difficult to explain. Kennan speculated, late in life, that he might have done better as a poet or a novelist, but only at great cost, “because art is open-ended, and I didn’t have a balanced enough personal life to have gone into this expression of the emotional without being torn to pieces by it.”42
Kennan’s life seemed sufficiently balanced, by the spring of 1929, for his superiors to send him on to greater things. From Tallinn, Carlson, despite the unfortunate weekend at his dacha, praised Kennan as “unquestionably the most gifted of any of the subordinate officers who have been under my supervision.” He had applied himself assiduously to learning Russian, had high moral standards, and was in good health, even though his only exercise appeared to be “long walks with his dog.” F. W. B. Coleman, the minister in Riga, endorsed this assessment, adding that while “Mr. Kennan might [earlier] have been charged with being too serious, too loath to leave his books and to make social contacts, ... [the] charge is no longer sustained. He . . . commands the confidence of all people whom he approaches.” These accolades were enough for the Department of State, which in July congratulated Kennan “on the successful conclusion of your probationary period for language assignment. It is hoped that an equal measure of success will attend your studies at Berlin.”43
VI.
In the midst of a conversation, one evening in Riga, someone mentioned Berlin. “In a flash,” George recorded in his diary, “I see the Leipzigerstrasse, every detail of it, as clearly as though I were standing in the traffic tower on Potsdamer Place.” There were the cold, hard buildings, the boulevards swept shiny by the automobiles and the streetlamps, the shop windows spilling confused light onto jostling pedestrians, the huge buses with blinking signal-arms roaring through intersections, the yellow streetcars with ventilators spinning on their roofs, grinding to a halt before the corners. The vision was tactile in its intensity: “I feel the whole vibration and excitement of the city . . . and all the cruelty and fascination and adventure with which it throbs.”44
Kennan’s assignment was to enroll in Russian-language courses at the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, and to take advantage of other opportunities in that city, as might be practicable, to study the geography, history, and institutions of Eastern Europe. The State Department would pay for tuition, textbooks, and living expenses. The seminar’s two-year curriculum, designed chiefly to train Russian translators and interpreters for the German courts, was of limited use. Having taught himself conversational Russian while in Tallinn and Riga, Kennan was able to pass the required examination at the end of his first year, “barely skimming through.” The rest of his time was spent more profitably, studying Russian history at the University of Berlin, as well as Russian language and literature with private tutors. Kelley had instructed his young protégés to equip themselves with an education similar to that which an educated Russian of the prerevolutionary era would have received. Exposure to Soviet affairs could come later.45
Just as important for Kennan, however, was the experience of living in Berlin at a remarkable moment in its history. The city had “surprised both itself and the rest of the world by becoming the centre of a cultural explosion,” one of its historians has written. Suddenly it “threw off the Prussian imperial mantle, emerging as the capital of modernism and the undisputed centre of the ‘Golden Twenties.’ ” It became, for Kennan, “the nearest thing I had known to an adult home.”46
Soon after he arrived, George sought to rekindle his relationship with Charlotte Böhm, but she was seeing another man and probably understood “that I was too young for her, really.” Disturbed nonetheless, he consulted a psychiatrist, who recommended a breakup: “My dear fellow, you’re just a Pantoffelheld. You’re a slipper-hero; you’re under the domination of this woman. You’d better get out of it.” And so, as George wrote Jeanette early in 1930, “I must put the idea out of my mind.”47
There were other women: “Hello. Miss L——? This is the American you talked to the other night at the Russian opera.... I’d sort of like to go out and paint the town red, and I wondered if you’d come along.” “Very red?” “Well, pretty red. Besides, I haven’t been out with an American girl for pretty nearly two years.” “All right, I’d be glad to.” So they tried the Femina, famous for its table telephones and pneumatic tubes, but found it full. Then the Kakadoo, where the orchestra played far too fast. “I drink my whiskey-soda, she her cocktail, and we leave the bottle of Rheinwein standing on the table.” And then home, alone, where “I drink another whiskey-soda, ... at the same time wondering what it is that forces me to act like a gentleman, when I am with an American woman.”
The next diary entry is titled “Fantasia.” A man in a fur coat walking along the Kurfürstendamm at five o’clock on a Sunday morning meets a polite prostitute and goes to bed with her between bare blankets. The woman’s legs are cold, as though she were dead. Afterward he is back on the street where, if listening closely, one might hear “a sudden, unexpected, half-suppressed sob, above the whining of the wind.” What the man demanded of life was unbearably greater than what he had received, all of which might move one to pity someone “so utterly lost, in the cold winter dawn, in the forest of stone and steel which is called the city.” But sympathy is a dangerous thing, so he should be allowed “to turn into a side-street and to seek his rest where he can.... (wicked, degenerate man, he must be, coming brazenly home at this hour, from the whores).”48
All diaries entangle fiction with truth, so there’s little point in seeking to sort out here which was which. George did admit to Jeanette shortly thereafter, though, that “I had a very bad bringing up . . . (you needn’t tell Father).” He had learned “to look for all sorts of things in the world, which aren’t in it at all, and the few good things which the world has to offer, are things which I have never learned to see.” As was often the case, the mood did not last: two weeks later George was back from nine days on the French Riviera, feeling “like a new man. I hope to work hard at Russian and play a lot of tennis . . . and forget that life is supposed to have other, more significant experiences.”49 And he had, by then, a new family.
“January 19, 1930. . . . Youn
g Russian émigré to lunch. Burning eyes, deep pride, resentment and mistrust. Reputedly a tendency to tuberculosis. We discuss language, perfunctorily, he commenting on the fact that translations of foreign books into Russian are natural and veracious, whereas Russian novels, translated into foreign languages, lose all their Russian character.” He was Vladimir (Volodya) Kozhenikov, who with his mother and sister eked out a precarious existence in a cellar in Spandau. George met Volodya through Cyrus Follmer, then serving as vice-consul in Berlin, and “we became good friends.” On the day George took his final examination in Russian at the Oriental Seminar, Volodya had wanted to stand outside ready to whisper him answers. Still mindful of the Princeton honor code, George refused, but he became an adopted member of the Kozhenikov family. 50
The Kozhenikovs survived “only by a series of those miraculous last-minute rescues that God reserves for the truly innocent and utterly improvident.” George and Cyrus did what they could to keep them afloat. “They are a tremendously proud family and it’s not easy for them to take help,” George explained to Jeanette. The spontaneity of their devotion embarrassed him: “enthusiastic visits at unexpected hours, elaborate gifts they couldn’t possibly afford.” But he was pleased to be accepted as a Russian. “Sharing their woes and crises, I felt like a Russian myself.”51
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