Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS I By William Henry Chamberlin Kennan's Debut As Historian GEORGE F. KENNAN has made a remarkably brilliant debut as an historian. The first volume of his projected...
...And the first paragraph, with its evocative picture of the spirit and atmosphere of the imperial city founded by Peter the Great, is worth quoting as an example of the distinction of the author's style: "The city of Sankt Petersburgh- St...
...Petrograd, no longer St...
...The first volume of his projected multi-volume work on Soviet-American relations from 1917 through 1920 (Russia Leaves the War, Princeton, $7.50) grips and holds the reader's imagination and attention from beginning to end...
...His study of American-Soviet relations during the period from the Bolshevik seizure of power on November 7, 1917 until the ratification of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk four months later is buttressed with citations from many manuscript and archive collections, as well as with references to a wide range of printed material...
...The heaven is vast, the sky-line remote and extended...
...The high northern latitude, the extreme slant of the sun's rays, the flatness of the terrain, the frequent breaking of the landscape by wide, shimmering expanses of water: all these combine to accent the horizontal at the expense of the vertical and to create everywhere the sense of immense space, distance and power...
...Raymond Robins, a passionate, energetic man with a gift for self-dramatization, a susceptibility to the personal magnetism of Lenin and Trotsky, and an unshakable conviction that the Soviet Government could be wheedled into continuing resistance to Germany...
...Kennan happily combines with color and grace and elegance of diction a conscientious devotion to exacting standards of historical scholarship...
...This is obviously no dry-as-dust, run-of-the-mill research historian...
...And at that time there was no anti-Soviet force of sufficient stability to warrant the risks of intervention...
...John Reed, and many others...
...He possesses a gift of imaginative reconstruction, but he never lets imagination serve as a substitute for facts when facts are ascertainable...
...a somewhat naive idea that, if you only put enough Americans, regardless of linguistic and other qualifications, into Russia, a desirable objective was being realized...
...a multiplication of Government agencies, working at cross-purposes...
...There was no possibility of establishing firm or friendly relations with the Soviet regime...
...One feels almost personally acquainted with the principal actors in the drama: Ambassador David Francis, with the virtues and faults of a Midwestern politician...
...Americans and other foreigners in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution tended to divide into two camps: those who believed that no sound relations could be established with the new regime and those who believed that the Soviet regime was a going concern which could, with proper handling, be induced to take an anti-German position...
...From the beginning...
...Cleaving the city down the center, the cold waters of the Neva move silently and swiftly, like a slab of smooth grey metal, past the granite embankments and the ponderous palaces, bringing with them the tang of the lonely wastes of forests and swamp from which they have emerged...
...without rancor or bitterness, Kennan shows how some of the familiar weaknesses of American foreign relations cropped up during this strange interlude of confrontation with a doctrinaire revolutionary regime...
...There was an exaggerated idea of what America could accomplish...
...At every hand one feels the proximity of the great wilderness of the Russian north -silent, sombre, infinitely patient...
...Edgar Sisson, the OWI man of the First World War, intent on proving that the Bolshevik leaders were German agents...
...Actually, as Kennan ably shows, foreigners could do little to influence the course of events...
...Chief advocates of the latter viewpoint were Robins, Captain Jacques Sadoul, a French left-wing Socialist who later went over to the Communists, and, with more sophistication and reservations, the British unofficial diplomatic agent, Bruce Lockhart...
...By writing this model piece of historical research, in which style and scholarship are admirably matched...
...But Mr...
...When President Wilson, under the influence of William C. Bullitt, whose views about the Soviet regime were to change radically in later years, sent a friendly message to the Congress of Soviets in March, the response was a deliberate slap in the face, an expression of hope for the speedy coming of revolution in the United States...
...Characters are recreated with the same skill as place atmosphere...
...Petersburg, not yet Leningrad, provides the main stage setting for the historical drama which Kennan unfolds...
...Kennan has proved that whatever diplomacy may have lost by his retirement history has gained...
...Robins's shrewd Russian interpreter, Alex Gumberg...
...In his grave, mellow way...
...Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, call it what you will-is one of the strangest, loveliest, most terrible and most dramatic of the world's great urban centers...
Vol. 39 • September 1956 • No. 38
