II.
After an uneventful voyage, the Kennans spent a few days in London before meeting their own Air Force plane, which came equipped with a colonel—Annelise, “highly pregnant,” would have preferred a midwife. It flew them to Wiesbaden, where she was impressed to see George get the military honors of a five-star general. They then drove to Bad Godesberg, where she was to have the baby, while John and Patricia Davies, recently posted to Bonn, would help take care of Christopher. George proceeded to Berlin and after that Moscow, arriving there on the afternoon of May 6, having arranged to avoid the May Day celebrations with their inevitably anti-American character.10
It was his first trip back since 1946. A building boom was under way: massive wedding-cake structures were rising around the city, each thirty to forty stories high, all to be topped off with spires supporting garishly illuminated red stars. In contrast to what Kennan remembered from the war, urban transit was working: “They have traffic regulated within an inch of its life.” Off the main streets, there were still log cabins with no indoor plumbing, “but they are making progress.” At Spaso House, a few servants he remembered were there to greet him, including two elderly Chinese, who retained “a concept of their calling somewhat higher than that by which the Russians were animated.” All appeared to be under orders to show no pleasure at his arrival, however, and to do as little as possible to help him move in. Setting out for a walk the next day, he found his “angels”—the plainclothesmen assigned to follow him everywhere—waiting at the gate. Hugh Cumming and Elim O’Shaughnessy, the embassy’s second- and third-ranking officers, gave him lunch in the Kennans’ old apartment at the Mokhovaya. Dinner that evening was on a tray, “and here I am,” George wrote Annelise, “alone at night in the vast recesses of an empty Spaso.”
Recently redecorated, the house looked good on the inside, but the servant problem was serious: “I wish you were here to help, for I think you are the only person who can do anything.” He was already missing his family: “It seems like years, instead of just four days, since I said goodby to you.” Finding a bag filled with Christopher’s clothes had almost caused him to weep. But the little park in front of Spaso was full of children, “and I have hopes that if he is not too conspicuously dressed he will be able to play there normally.” There were hundreds of things to say, but it was hard to know where to begin, “and I am sleepy, so I will close now.”
“So you have had your baby!” he wrote on the eleventh, after the communications officer awakened him at three A.M. with the news. Because there were no direct telephone connections between Moscow and Bonn, he knew nothing other than that Annelise and her daughter were well, and that she was to be called Wendy. He was “mad with curiosity. What a feeling of frustration.” Nevertheless, “three girls and a boy now. . . . Just like my own mother’s family.”11
The new American ambassador presented his credentials to the figurehead Soviet president, Nikolay Shvernik, in a carefully scripted Kremlin ceremony on May 14. Speaking in Russian from a memorized text, Kennan expressed hope that his actions in Moscow would “meet with the understanding and collaboration of the Soviet Government.” Shvernik promised “collaboration” in his reply but said nothing about “understanding.” The event took place in the same ballroom where eighteen and a half years earlier a younger Kennan—having learned the night before of his father’s death—had stood behind a self-confident Bullitt, trying very hard not to faint. It had all gone like clockwork this time, George wrote Annelise: at least “what little potential value the position might have has not been diminished by anything that has happened so far.” Meanwhile “[w]e have gotten a vegetable garden worked up—lettuce, radishes, and dill already planted—tomatoes and beans to go in, with luck, this weekend.”12
Annelise’s first letter, written two days before the baby’s birth, reached Moscow via diplomatic pouch only on the fifteenth. By that time George was deeply into the round of calls he was expected to make on Soviet officials and members of the diplomatic corps. There would be, he estimated, fifty or sixty of these: he, in turn, would host return calls at Spaso House, a process that would go on for weeks. The mood, he warned her, “has become grim in a way it never was before.” Reinforcing it was a propaganda campaign that exceeded “in viciousness, shamelessness, mendacity and intensity” anything he had experienced before in the Soviet Union, or even in Nazi Germany. The purpose, he reported to the State Department on the twenty-second, appeared to be “to arouse hatred, revulsion and indignation with regard to Americans,” who were said to be using bacteriological weapons in Korea while torturing prisoners “with red hot irons, hanging them upside down, pouring water into their noses, forcibly tattooing them, forcing them to sign treasonable statements in blood, etc.” The vilification was “on a scale hardly excelled in human history.”13
Managing Spaso was still an ordeal. Burobin, the Central Bureau for Services to the Diplomatic Corps, supplied a staff of twenty-two, all of whom presumably reported to the secret police. They were under orders not to do anything other than what they had been told to do, to remain on the premises for as short a time as possible, “and above all never to permit themselves to enjoy, or feel a part of, the family in which they are working.” It was like being served by “tight-lipped ghosts.” Determined to make a point, Kennan fired the night watchman, who was showing up only occasionally. But that left him alone every evening, wandering around like a ghost himself. Guards outside followed his movements from room to room by watching the lights go on and off: “Somehow or other, it doesn’t seem to get me down; but I really wonder whether we can or should be asked to live this way.” Spaso was safe enough: no one would dare break in. But the atmosphere—Annelise would not have missed the allusion to Bad Nauheim—“is more like a sort of a prison-hotel than like a home.”14
“Anneliesschen—sweetheart,” George wrote her early in June: “If there has been a gap in these letters, it has been because I did not send the one I wrote to you on Sunday.” It had seemed too depressing: “Letters are unsatisfactory things.” But there were less than three weeks left. “That’s not so terrible, though it seems a long time.” He would travel to Leningrad, he added a week later, and then “only five days will remain before this separation is over. Dreamed the other night that I saw Christopher, but he had grown quite big and didn’t recognize me.”15
The opportunity to see his wife, son, and new daughter in Bad Godesberg arose from an Acheson trip to London. Kennan would meet the secretary of state, update him on Soviet-American relations, and then bring all of the family—Grace and Joan would be out of school by then—back with him to Moscow along with their own small staff, a modest declaration of independence from Burobin. There was, however, a strangely sinister aspect to this visit. On June 25 Samuel Reber, the political adviser to the U.S. high commissioner in Bonn, John McCloy, passed the word to Frank Wisner, at the CIA in Washington, that Kennan could meet briefly in London the next day with the “Representatives.”16
There turned out to be only one, Peer de Silva of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, who had been sent to discuss assigning an undercover agent to work out of the Moscow embassy. Kennan opposed the idea, as had Bohlen when consulted on it earlier. De Silva noticed, though, that “the ambassador was very tense and nervous.” At the end of the meeting, he said he had something to ask of the agency. As de Silva remembered it, Kennan handed him an envelope, which he said contained a letter to Pope Pius XII. He wanted it passed to Allen Dulles, the deputy director of central intelligence, with the request that it reach the Vatican by secure means. There was “a good possibility that I will wind up someday before long on the Soviet radio,” Kennan explained. “I may be forced to make statements that would be damaging to American policy. This letter will show the world that I am under duress and am not making statements under my own free will.” Did the CIA not have “some sort of a pill that a person could use to kill himself instantly”?
De Silva acknowledged that it did: sma
ll glass vials containing cyanide, which, when bitten, would release the chemical with lethal results. “I think I must have two of these,” Kennan told him. De Silva promised to pass the request along—if Dulles approved, the pills could be sent by diplomatic pouch. There was a long puzzled silence when de Silva conveyed this to Dulles after flying back to Washington, but he finally decided that the agency could not deny Kennan the pills if he really wanted them.17
When asked about this in 1987, Kennan pointed out that the prospect of war was very real at the time. He had no confidence that the Soviets would observe “the amenities,” as the Germans had done in 1941–42, and that internment had been bad enough: “If they had decided to sacrifice their mission [in the United States], they wouldn’t have hesitated to arrest us and then to put me in solitary confinement.” Having held senior positions in the State Department, he had information his interrogators might try to extract by torture: “If that was what I had to face, I was quite prepared to—I asked for this.” But he had asked to be provided “with pills that you could easily conceal.... God knows what Stalin would have done.”18
Elbridge Durbrow, who read de Silva’s account shortly after it appeared in 1978, had a different explanation: “Something got to George. I don’t know what it was, [maybe] the KGB got to him and said: ‘We’ve got the goods on you.’ ” After all, “they tried to screw up every ambassador there the best they could one way or another.” Hugh Cumming was more specific. Kennan had gotten into trouble “with some ‘dame’ and thought the Russians might in some way publicize it.” They did not do this, “and he’s been grateful ever since.”19
III.
Kennan was lonely during his first six weeks in Moscow, and there was an opportunity for romance. The American embassy still maintained a dacha outside of the city, but it had become so run-down that he was reluctant to use it. He preferred a smaller one rented by correspondents Harrison Salisbury, Thomas P. Whitney, and Whitney’s Russian wife, Juli Zapolskaya—soon he had his own key. “There is a sound of hammers, dogs barking, chickens, children’s cries, and distant trains,” George wrote Annelise from the front porch one afternoon at the end of May, “a relief from the old beat between Spaso and Mokhovaya.” The dacha was a refuge for a temporary bachelor: he could go on walks (accompanied by angels, to be sure, but they allowed him a sympathetic distance), indulge in long late conversations in rapid Russian with the Whitneys (Salisbury, still learning the language, struggled to keep up), and accompany songs that they all could sing (Russian and American) on his guitar. The atmosphere, Kennan recalled, was one of “health and simplicity and subdued hope which I drank in, on my brief visits there, as one drinks in fresh air after long detention in a stuffy room.”
He described Juli, in his memoirs, only as “a musician and chanteuse of talent.” Salisbury, in his, went further. She had, he was certain, fallen in love: “No one who saw Juli’s face light up and her eyes glow in George’s presence could mistake the feeling.” He was, to her, “a character out of not Chekhov but Turgenev, sophisticated, wise, urbane, gifted with a philosophy and emotion close to the Russian heart. He was Russian but not Russian, American but a special kind of American. She could talk to him all day and all night.” Only wife and country kept George from reciprocating: “He was an extraordinarily happily married man, and strongly as he was drawn to this most Russian of relationships, he was not prepared to venture on an excursion down that path.” He told Juli, according to Salisbury, that he had
made a decision of principle; he had placed himself at the service of his country, and this service came ahead of personal desires and inclinations. His life, in a sense, was no longer at his disposal; it was his country’s. This declaration, so similar to that of a priest’s in dedicating himself to the service of God, might have sounded presumptuous in another man. But from the lips of the serious and solemn Kennan, one could only respect it.
Salisbury believed Juli did. “She smiled at him, she gave him her most tender looks, but she made no effort by the arts of her coquetry to woo him from his resolve.”20
To be sure, Salisbury—and Whitney, for that matter—may not always have been present. But angels were, and as George was well aware, they reported on his activities in the country as carefully as they tracked his movements within the gloomy precincts of Spaso House. “The great good earth of Mother Russia,” he wrote a friend later that summer,
seems to exude her benevolent and maternal warmth over man and beast and growing things together; and only, perhaps, an American Ambassador, stalking through the countryside with his company of guardians to the amazement of the children and the terror of the adults, is effectively isolated, as though by an invisible barrier, from participation in the general beneficence of nature and human sociability.21
It was hardly the setting for an affair, however lonely Kennan may have been. So what else could have caused him to request suicide pills in the same week that he rejoined his family and first met his new daughter?
Kennan kept no diary during this period, probably for fear that it might fall into the hands of the Soviet authorities. Major General Robert W. Grow, the Army attaché in Moscow while Kirk was ambassador, had suffered just that misfortune in 1951 and had been court-martialed as a result. Kirk’s wife, Lydia Chapin Kirk, had committed a less serious indiscretion by rushing a gossipy account of Spaso House life into print in the United States before her husband had formally resigned. George was not about to risk adding to “the follies of our predecessors,” he wrote to Annelise early in June 1952. Because of them, she should “not be surprised at the coolness of the reception that awaits you in Moscow . . . I am not.”22
Nonetheless he was surprised. Sir Alvary Gascoigne, the British ambassador, found Kennan unprepared for how differently foreign missions were treated from when he had last served in the U.S.S.R.: “This came as quite a shock to him.” Cumming remembered Kennan returning from a walk one day soon after his arrival, so subdued that he seemed ill. “Hugh, I am shocked to discover [that] the Soviets regard me as such a dangerous person.” I said: “What do you mean?” “Why, this outbreak of anti-American posters all over the town.” “George, those damn things have been there for months! I honestly don’t think that they have anything personally to do with you.” But Kennan wasn’t listening: he got “that rather distant, misty look in his eyes,” which showed that he was composing a dispatch. Calling in a secretary—not Hessman, who would only later join him in Moscow—he “lay down on the sofa to dictate, almost like a patient in a psychoanalyst’s office. I envied him the ability,” Cumming recalled, “to do that.”23
The result was a long letter to Doc Matthews, pouched to Washington to ensure security. There were, Kennan suggested, four possible reasons for the Kremlin’s propaganda offensive. The first was to boost sagging morale in the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist world, where there was “widespread political apathy and skepticism.” With the exception of the wartime years, however, that disillusionment had been present since the purges of the late 1930s—alone it could not account for what now was going on. A second explanation was mobilization for war: Kennan had never believed, though, that Stalin would deliberately unleash one. A third was some kind of leadership struggle, but there was no hard evidence for this. That left a fourth possibility, which was that the campaign “might have something to do with my own appointment and arrival.”
Kennan was known to Stalin and his associates, after all, as someone who was not “bloodthirsty and boorish, . . . lacking in good will, ignorant and contemptuous of Russian cultural values, [or] obtuse to developments in the world of the Russian spirit.” Because of his prior service in the country and his knowledge of the language, they might have interpreted his appointment as an indication that the U.S. government was ready for “real” discussions on significant issues. Why, then, the anti-American campaign? To the normal mind, it could hardly be a less fitting prelude for diplomacy. But Stalin’s mind was not normal:
Le
t us remember that it has been the policy, and apparently sometimes the secret delight, of Stalin, before adopting a given course, to eliminate or force into an embarrassing position all those who might be suspected of having themselves favored such a course.
It was also important to the Kremlin leaders, when on the verge of making even minor concessions, not to seem to have been pressured into doing so.
This might have particular relation to myself if they felt that my personality and presence here tied in in any way with the neurotic uneasiness which besets a large number of Soviet artists and intellectuals in present circumstances in connection with their extreme isolation from the main cultural currents of the world.
If Stalin did see any possibility of a Cold War settlement, then, he might think it useful “to remind a new and somewhat inscrutable American Ambassador . . . that if he is going to talk to anyone around here it is going to be to Papa—that the other members of the family know their places and are well in hand.”
But an invitation to talk with Papa would have thrilled Kennan, even though he had resolved—given his lack of instructions from Washington—not to ask for one: why did he still feel threatened? He now came up with a fifth explanation, which was that the Soviet authorities had developed a “reckless contempt for whatever values and safeguards might conceivably still lie in the maintenance of the normal diplomatic channel.” That had not happened during Kennan’s previous service in Moscow. Now, though, the restraint was gone. There was, in its place, “the excited, uncertain bravado of the parvenu who thinks that his fortunes have advanced to the point where he need no longer pretend to be a man of correct behavior or even a man of respect for correct behavior.” It was
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