George Kennan

I finished George Kennan's Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin a while ago. The book started out as a series of lectures, delivered at Oxford and Harvard in the late 1950s, and has since become a classic of analysis of the West's relationship to early Soviet Union. The book is excellent, and I cannot recommend it enough to every thinking American (heck, every thinking person anywhere).

First of all, it offers succinct but comprehensive coverage of the events in Europe and Russia from the end of WWI to the end of WWII focusing, obviously, on what was happening in Russia and how European governments reacted to it. Some of this history was a welcome review for me, but I am not an historian, so a lot of it provided many details of events that I was only aware of in very general terms. Finally, a few things were completely new to me , and rather shocking at that. Poland, fresh from being granted independence by the Versailles Treaty, invaded Russia in 1919 and sacked Kiev?!?! I had no idea.

Second, Kennan leaves no stone unturned when it comes to the evils perpetrated by the Bolsheviks. He is a perfect diplomat, and in a lot of ways a perfect gentleman, never descending into accusations or vitriol, but no duplicity, no assassination, and no show trial goes unrecorded and uncondemned. His chapter on Stalin's rise to power is very useful. For anyone who is not ready to take up a full biography (and I would argue that everyone, at some point in their life, must; the same goes for Hitler and perhaps two or three others), Kennan's is an excellent primer. I, while hyper-aware, of course, of what Stalin did, and, in pargamtic terms, why he did it, have not stopped very often to think about what drove him to do it initially; about the deeper, inner "why" that motivated him. Kennan helped.

Finally, as with his memoirs (this book is much better written, by the way), I enjoyed seeing some general observations about the behavior of individuals and societies that are just as relevant today as they were at the end of the first decade of the Cold War. I realize there is no shortage of historical examples that demonstrate the myriad ways in which our current war in Iraq is such a mess, and how it got to be that way. Still, it was nice (if that's the right word) to see Kennan state in the late 1950s exactly what the US government has been ignoring since 2001:

...we cannot divide our external environment neatly and completely into friends and enemies -- that there must be a certain relativism about enmity, as I suppose there must be about friendship -- that we must learn to recognize a certain duality in our relationship to all the rest of mankind, even those who hate us most. (p. 65)

Clearly a passage that anyone who subscribed to the "you are either for us or against us" rallying cry soundly ignored.

Here he is again, discussing the West's failure to engage Russia constructively immediately after WWI:

Th[e] inadequacy of information was not just one of knowledge but also one of understanding. It was not just a matter of day-to-day factual information; it was a matter of being able to envisage and apprehend the spirit of another society. (p. 142)

Another lesson, that neither we nor most other societies in the world, have learned sufficiently.

The last bit I want to quote here is for me probably the most significant, because it is most often ignored today. The war in Iraq rages on, so we are bound to be reminded of its moral and political implications regularly. The Cold War, technically, is almost two decades behind us, and since historical memory is shockingly short (see above), we would do well to pay attention to Kennan's assessment of the Comintern (the arm of the Russian Communist party that was responsible for subversive activity outside of Russia):

The Comintern was a highly disciplined and extremely serious organization, partly political, partly military... It meant business; and it meant it in as serious and ruthless a way as any conspiratorial organization has ever done. It played for mortal stakes (my emphasis). (p. 178)

I am not quoting this as a commentary on any aspect of current US policy. Rather, I am trying to suggest that anyone who had ever had the mifsortune of having been taken in by any flavor of antihistorical Marxist ideology would do well to read Kennan and compare his sentiments about the Comintern to those we have about current threats to free societies, and to draw their own conclusions.