Unpeaceful Coexistence

RUSSIA AND THE WEST UNDER LENIN

AND STALIN (41 I pp.)--George F. Kennan--Atlantic-Little, Brown ($5.75).

On one of the early shaky days of the Bolshevik regime, Lenin dashed off a one-sentence scrawl to a meeting of the Central Committee: "I request that my vote be added in favor of the acceptance of potatoes and arms from the bandits of Anglo-French imperialism." Short months before, Woodrow Wilson had rhetorically hailed the promise of the Russian revolution: "Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia? Here is a fit partner for a league of honor."

These two statements epitomize persistent attitudes in the relationships of Russia and the West. Ranging over the period 1917-45, George F. Kennan, U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia and onetime (1952) Ambassador to Russia, finds that the Russians were guided, more often than not, by cynical opportunism and undisguised hostility. The West, on the other hand, was often misguided by a parochial naivete and idealism. Author Kennan believes that there is more than disillusionment to be learned from four decades of troubled coexistence, though his book tends to prove the opposite. Based on a series of lectures at Oxford and Harvard, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (a June Book-of-the-Month Club choice) is essentially a blackboard book full of popularized history and a liberal use of teacher's pointer. Two major lessons he points to: 1) the West should not allow moralizing or dogmatic thinking to keep it from a flexible strategy; 2) with due caution, the West can count on a relatively restrained Kremlin line. Even readers who bridle at the dangers inherent in both propositions will find the Kennan line beguilingly argued, the style invariably graceful, and the scholarship illuminating.

Dangers of Intervention. The lessons begin with World War I. If the Allies had agreed to a negotiated peace in early 1917, instead of insisting on Germany's unconditional surrender, there might never have been a Communist Russia, argues Kennan, riding his favorite thesis. It was the strain of the war effort against Germany that toppled Czarist Russia into complete anarchy. When the Bolsheviks seized power, calumny poisoned communication between Russia and the West. Many Westerners strongly believed that the Bolsheviks were German agents. For their part, the Bolsheviks looked for an imminent worldwide socialist revolution and dismissed the war as capitalist insanity. Yet it was the war, and only the war, says Kennan, that led to the botched and ill-conceived Allied intervention in Russian territory during 1918-20. Current Soviet historians affect to believe that the token Allied forces represented a concerted capitalist plot to crush the infant Soviet state. Actually, the Allies had thousands of tons of military supplies at Archangel and Vladivostok that they wished to protect and salvage.

The net effect of intervention, as Author Kennan sees it, was simply to solidify popular support of the Bolsheviks at a time when a score of separate Russian governments were contesting Lenin's right to rule on Russian soil. The Literary Digest pronounced an epitaph over the whole policy of intervention that is still pertinent despite its rather awkward style: "Some might have liked us more if we had intervened less. Some might have disliked us less if we had intervened more. But having concluded that we intended to intervene no more nor no less than we actually did, nobody had any use for us at all."

Bees at the Summit. During the '20s, by shortsightedly snubbing the fledgling Weimar Republic, the Western powers drove "the two naughty boys of Europe," Germany and Russia, into the temporary agreement of the Rapallo Treaty. This was the direct byproduct of a 1922 summit conference at Genoa, which confirmed a distaste and distrust for summit diplomacy that Kennan already felt: "One sees the senior statesmen harried, pressed, groaning under the spotlight of publicity, under the limitations of physical and nervous strength, flitting from problem to problem like bees from one flower to another, hoping always that some sort of pollination will spring from their magic touch."

The Western powers awoke in the late '30s to find Russians and Germans together again, the twin monsters of Stalin and Hitler linked by the Nazi-Soviet pact. By then, the West was too weak to defeat either of these adversaries without the help of the other: "As early as the late 1930s, no clean moral victory for the West was any longer in the cards. Only the very strong, or those so weak that they do not choose to compete in terms of power, can enjoy the luxury of acting purely in the name of ideals; the others have to make their compromises."

Friends Complicate. Too many compromises and concessions were offered Stalin during World War II, argues Kennan, especially for his unneeded help against Japan. Yet it was not Yalta, but the Red Army, Kennan insists, that made Stalin the master of eastern Europe. Here again, like countless other critics, Kennan puts serious blame on the policy of unconditional surrender, for this meant that the war could not be over until Allied and Russian troops actually met--and the Russians got farther faster.

For all his aggrandizement of Soviet power, Stalin was no diplomatic seer. His misjudgment of Hitler--he did not believe that the Nazis would attack Russia--cost the Russians 20 million lives. There is a rude if ludicrous poetic justice in the spectacle of poker-faced Molotov, "a man with the physique of the old-time barroom bouncer" querying the German ambassador with bewildered pathos--"Can it really be that we have deserved this?"--as German tanks roared across the Russian frontier in June 1941. Ironically, Stalin achieved some of his greediest bargaining coups--Manchurian railways, Port Arthur --only to have to cede them later to his proud and touchy ally Red China.

Red China will permanently alter the Russian future, in Kennan's view: "People who have only enemies don't know what complications are; for that, you have to have friends; and these the Soviet government, thank God, now has." Kennan hopefully thinks that, as a modern reincarnation of the murderous Ivan the Terrible, Stalin may have immunized the Soviet state against Stalinism. He believes that Khrushchev is the effect, and not the cause, of "the thaw."

Put Away Absolutes. In general, Kennan is brilliant in his criticism of the unconditional surrender viewpoint, the belief in summit conferences, and similar fetishes of U.S. policy. He is considerably less convincing in his case for the relatively "moderate" Russian line, and there seems to be a distinct danger that belief in such moderation could become the kind of inflexible tenet that Kennan himself considers so dangerous. The sum of his advice to the U.S. is to keep talking to the Russians while watching and waiting --but he never suggests what to watch and to wait for. He merely pleads over and over with Americans to stop being inflexible and moralistic and start being relativist and realistic: "We must, as the Biblical phrase goes, put away childish things; and among these childish things the first to go, in my opinion, should be self-idealization and the search for absolutes in world affairs: for absolute security, absolute amity, absolute harmony. Let us not repeat the mistake of believing that either good or evil is total. No other people, as a whole, is entirely our enemy. No people at all--not even ourselves--is entirely our friend."

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