A Nightmare to Remember

RUSSIA LEAVES THE WAR (544 pp.)--George F. Kennan--Princeton University ($7.50).

The West manages to persuade itself every few years that the Communists are changing, that internal troubles, outside pressure or a deliberate switch of policy are causing a new Communist era. Once again the air is full of such talk. The idea is that most of the evils in Soviet Russia were caused by one man, and this line is fostered by a lot of people, from statesmen (who call on the present rulers of Russia to turn their backs on the wrongs of Stalinism) down to movie producers (who are dreaming up movies about Joe's crimes).

To get a perspective on these notions, it is well to turn away from the headlines and go back to the beginning. That is the task undertaken by George F. Kennan, onetime (1952) U.S. Ambassador to Russia, now professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies. Russia Leaves the War is the first volume (two more to come) of his history of Russia's time of troubles. It might as justly have been called Russia Leaves the West, for with the triumph in 1917 of Lenin's Bolsheviks over Russia's first and only democratic (Kerensky) government, the Czar's old empire made its fateful turn toward ancient patterns of tyranny and away from the liberal currents of the West.

In clear and resourceful prose, Kennan has threaded through a huge maze of diplomatic papers to present a clear picture of America's first frustrations in dealing with the new power. The very first year of the Red Revolution set the future pattern: Western liberal gullibility trying to cope with men who have raised deceit to the level of a philosophy.

Fool's Mate. Kennan's book begins by evoking the grimness of the Russian scene seen at its capital, Petrograd, where at every hand "one feels the proximity of the great wilderness of the Russian north--silent, somber, infinitely patient." Lenin and Trotsky were emerging as the main figures on that somber scene. These agile clever, ruthless and dedicated men--Stalin was still a poisonous penumbra on the horizon of history--were theoretically bent on directing Russia as an ally of the U.S. and the Anglo-French alliance against imperial Germany and Austria. The problem of the U.S. was to keep Russia in the war, and so block the movement of Germany's Eastern divisions to the Western Front. The problem of the Bolshevik leaders was simply to get out of the war--as they had promised their supporters--and still conquer and keep power.

The Bolsheviks won this game of chess by a fool's mate. The fools, of one sort or another, were the gullible men of the Western embassies. In the evening of Nov. 7, 1917, the Czar's Winter Palace was "stormed"--by the back door. Kennan sardonically notes, for, amid the confusion and vacillation of the defenders, someone had inadvertently left the back door open. At the time, British Ambassador Sir George Buchanan was gloomily watching artillery from the River Neva (blanks from the Russian cruiser Aurora, usually credited with a main role in the palace's capture). U.S. Ambassador David R. Francis was asleep, and a U.S. Red Cross missionary, Raymond Robins, was writing in his diary: "A great day for Russia and the world."

Next day Lenin and Trotsky made the first of Russia's coups in "Demonstrative Diplomacy." The commissars broadcast their "Decree on Peace," calling for an armistice "without the forcible incorporation of foreign nationalities." This later became an important item in Wilson's Fourteen Points. But the Reds themselves had not the slightest intention of applying their manifesto to their own affairs.

In the face of the new Machiavellians of Marxism, U.S. diplomacy was worse than muddled. Ambassador Francis was an old (67) ex-governor of Missouri with "the robust and simple tastes of the American Middle West." He had a kind face and a legendary personal spittoon with a clanking, pedal-operated lid. Despite an attachment to a lady named Matilda de Cram who was thought to be a German agent, he was a sensitive and conscientious official, but unfortunately he "did not know a Left Social-Revolutionary from a potato."

Perversion of Principle. In dealing with the Bolshevik master class, American idealism--with what Kennan calls its "fulsome vocabulary"--was a handicap. Americans knew in their bones that the principle of authority implicit in all government had been perverted by kings but could not yet believe that it could be worse perverted by those who claimed to speak in the name of the people. Elihu Root had been on a mission to help Russia restore the crumbling morale of its vast, shambling army. His recommendation: Y.M.C.A. groups should introduce healthy and uplifting recreation for the Czar's soldiers (somewhat like reading Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures to a man pegged on an ant bed). Idealism of another sort was in plentiful supply. Red Cross Emissary Raymond Robins--a rich lawyer-preacher, Klondike prospector and Bull Moose or ator--rushed about Petrograd, making speeches to the effect that "Trotsky is the greatest Jew since Jesus Christ."

While the U.S. and other Western powers dithered between idealism, horror and halfhearted plans for intervention, the Bolsheviks played the Germans off against the Allies and vice versa, got out of the war through a separate peace with Germany, concluded at Brest-Litovsk. The price was heavy (the Russians lost Poland and the Baltic provinces), but Lenin knew how to sacrifice a bishop to win a game. History was to repeat itself in World War II when the Soviets expertly played off ally and enemy (e.g., the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939) with equal cynicism.

Bad Neighbor Policy. Author Kennan is sparing of judgments, but the reader today cannot help feeling that U.S. diplomats were led astray by their devotion to "centralism," i.e., the notion that there was only "one" Russia to deal with (as there was later only "one" China). In fact there were still many Russias at the time; the Ukraine and in Transcaucasia lived large national groups violently opposed to Communism. In Transcaucasia, for instance, during elections for the Constituent Assembly of 1917, only 4.3% Of the electorate voted for the Bolsheviks. Yet according to a monstrosity of Marxist logic called "the principle of unanimity." (later to appear at the U.N.). the 4.3% was able to impose its rule over the 95.7%.

Kennan, who as Mr. X writing in Foreign Affairs plotted the "containment policy" toward Russia after World War II, has no startling recommendations to add to his record. By training and instinct, he habitually mutes moral judgments to the point of understatement. With his main plea--for a more skilled and knowledgeable diplomatic setup--all will agree. But the reader will sadly conclude that the overall Kennan line is that the U.S. can do no better than to pursue what might be called a "Bad Neighbor Policy"; i.e., the U.S. should know an evil thing when it sees it, but know also that there is nothing much to be done about it. It is essentially the line taken by Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, who said about the Red Revolution: " 'Do nothing' should be our policy until the black period of terrorism comes to an end."

Few Americans today would be willing to settle for such a fatalistic policy. Yet the Kennan volume may suggest that most of what has passed for U.S. "policy" toward Communism in recent decades has in fact been the Wilsonian do-nothing attitude disguised in rhetoric. In any case, the reader may well feel that the last and best word on 1917 was spoken by Philip Jordan, the old Negro valet of Ambassador David Francis, whom no one asked for an opinion. Phil Jordan wrote home to Mrs. Francis: "It is something awful."

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