![]() “The Soviet regime is a police regime par excellence, reared in the dim half world of Tsarist police intrigue, accustomed to think primarily in terms of police power,” he wrote. Others had warned of the menace presented by the USSR, but Kennan illuminated with vivid and lucid prose how that opaque regime was driven to a kind of defensive aggressiveness by its history, national traditions, and institutional makeup. Therefore, Kennan explained, the Soviets worked to exacerbate differences among capitalist powers, while manipulating the many Soviet sympathizers abroad. Kennan cut through the fog to pinpoint the premises of Soviet behavior: a division of the world into two irreconcilable camps, capitalist and socialist the tendency of contradictions within capitalism to generate world war the resultant likelihood of a capitalist military intervention to destroy the Soviet Union but also the possible windfall to socialism of, instead, an intra-capitalist war. The answer to Washington’s query, Kennan wrote, “involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of over-simplification.” Nineteen pages - some 5,000 words - followed, the longest telegram in State Department history. Averell Harriman already had departed for the last time, leaving the embassy to Kennan, the deputy chief of mission. ![]() Kennan had a fever and tooth trouble, and had tendered his resignation, so he expected to be leaving Moscow soon, but U.S. Washington wanted to know if the hardline speech delivered at the Bolshoi Theatre, part of the despot’s “re-election” to the Supreme Soviet, should be taken at face value. Kennan’s text constituted a response to, of all things, a campaign speech by Stalin. He was terribly absorbed - personally involved, somehow - in the terrible nature of the regime.” He was more thoughtful, more austere, more melancholy than they were. “He was not at all like the people in the State Department I knew in Washington during my service there. “I was, in a way, astonished,” the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who first met Kennan in Stalin’s Moscow in 1945, would recall. When he authored the Long Telegram in 1946, he had been abroad for 18 out of 19 years, and had just turned 42. Then, in June 1944, just as the Allies were making their D-Day landings in Normandy, Kennan was sent again to Moscow he traveled through the smoldering ruins of heroic Stalingrad on his way. ![]() After his release from a Nazi prison six months later, he was assigned to Lisbon and, after that, to London. Next came a posting to Nazi Berlin, where Kennan was taken into custody in December 1941 after Germany declared war on the United States. Kennan would be dispatched to Prague in 1938–39, in time to witness Hitler’s annihilation of Czechoslovakia. Kennan had entered the diplomatic service the year after graduating from Princeton, and gone on to serve at the embassy in Moscow after Franklin Roosevelt had granted diplomatic recognition to the USSR in 1933. The context was a widespread desire for continuation of the World War II alliance with the Soviets, and naïveté in many quarters about Joseph Stalin and his baffling regime. Last month marked the 70th anniversary of Kennan’s famous Long Telegram from Moscow to Washington, in which he outlined a resolute course of American foreign policy and galvanized the political establishment across the Republican-Democrat divide. These are enduring lessons as the United States confronts today’s large yet lesser threat of terrorism. He taught the importance of diplomacy, as well as the imperatives to integrate historical study into diplomatic practice and to avoid becoming like the very enemies we battle. victory in the Cold War, and a transcendent scholar, author of more than 20 books and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. Kennan ’25 was the grand architect of Communist containment, which brought U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |