Kennan as Historian
DALLIN, ALEXANDER
Kennan as Historian The Decision to Intervene. Reviewed by Alexander Dallin By George F. Kennan. Associate professor, Russian Institute, Princeton. 513 pp. $7.50. Columbia U.; author, "German...
...In the second volume of his admirable study on Soviet-American relations in 1917-20, George F. Kennan addresses himself to this six-month span from Brest-Litovsk to the Allied intervention—a period hardly less confused and perplexing than the preceding months he analyzed in such discriminating fashion in the first volume...
...The Decision to Intervene will also be studied for clues to the evolution of George F. Kennan...
...Without being a tract for our times, this—as the earlier—volume has its object lessons for today...
...To the political strategist, the American policies of 1918 unquestionably loom as a model of ineffectual confusion that involved the sacrifice of possible alternatives—whatever they might have been—to the certainty of failure...
...He leaves no doubt that the American intervention did not aim at ousting the Bolsheviks by force...
...There are some regrettable blemishes in this opus...
...It is in the old tradition also thanks to Mr...
...Dora Kaplan was not in fact executed...
...Across the minute detail, the beautiful vignettes and the wealth of archival material, there stands the "reality of a world tired—and confused...
...1 et he maintains that in the absence of intervention the prospects would have been "not utterly hopeless if only because this is a changing world...
...the chief of the Bolshevik press bureau to whom Lenin wrote a letter which Kennan reproduces in facsimile had nothing to do with Pavel Axelrod, the Men-shevik leader, with whom he confuses him...
...The decision to land was not reached in pursuit of any general policy goal...
...In its grand style, this is history writ in the old tradition...
...it was not taken after careful scrutiny of all the available facts...
...There is, of course, nothing here of the lately so volatile "on se desengage—et puis on voit" type of attitude...
...policy, instead of following through, remained restricted to muddling through—to inevitable frustration and failure...
...To the historian, this is another wise reconstruction, using the same wide range of rich (and often novel) documents, memoirs and private papers...
...He could not therefore "take part in such intervention or sanction it in principle...
...Ken-nan's recent analyses...
...Far from being a "capitalist crusade," it was motivated largely by military considerations in the war against Germany—and at one time was expected to have Bolshevik support...
...To the political analyst as well as to the historian, Mr...
...For good reason, Wilson and Lenin were worlds apart...
...For all this, Kennan makes a most convincing case...
...it was an artifact born in the tug-of-war among the Allies, in the whirlpool of domestic and personal pressures, in the wake of decisions taken independently by Americans and others in Russia (notably with regard to the Czech Legion, which virtually controlled the Trans-Siberian Railroad), and in the face of astounding misinformation on Soviet, German and Japanese intentions and prospects...
...He demonstrates that ''grave impediments to a fruitful development of Soviet-American relations would have been present in any case...
...And, as before, it is "the lack of an effective orderly arrangement for representation and information-gathering" that explains much of the failure in Washington: the prerequisite of intelligent diplomacy is diplomatic intelligence...
...But what were the alternatives...
...the congenital shallowness, philosophical and intellectual, of the approach to world problems that bubbled up from the fermentations of official Washington...
...yet some will sense whiffs of the sui generis isolationism which Dean Acheson has not been alone in discerning in Mr...
...Finally, he has now come to accept the view (much as E. H. Carr does) that Bolshevism was in 1917 and presumably is now an "indigenous manifestation of Russian political realities...
...But they could not conceivably have prevented the rise of Stalinist terror and tyranny, nor the basic problems that are with us today...
...Yet, within less than two months, the first of many thousands of American troops were ashore in Russia...
...It was stumbled upon in the "erosion of Wilson's resistance...
...What would closer Soviet-American ties in 1918-33 have achieved...
...Indeed, as he demonstrates vividly, time and again on the American side accidents were more important than design, and individuals played that supreme, decisive part that permitted them—at a brief interstice of history—to disregard "long-range trends" and overrule "inevitabilities...
...author, "German Rule in Russia" "It is the clear and fixed judgment of the Government of the United States," wrote President Wilson in mid-July 1918, ", that military intervention would add to the present sad confusion rather than cure it...
...And yet, in the light of later events, the limited impact of Russia on America and of America on Russia in the ensuing years is not likely to have been markedly different, whatever the course pursued in 1918...
...The failures of American statesmanship, Kennan writes, were rooted in "the deficiencies of the American political system from the standpoint of the conduct of foreign relations...
...It is a pleasure to read...
...The insistence on "realities," moreover, leads him to a rather cynical dissection of Wilson's idealism about the Russian people—a dissection whose spirit clashes sharply with the Kennan who seven years ago wrote America and the Russian Future...
...The author effectively and wisely makes nonsense of the intervention as it stood...
...and the pervasive dilettantism in the execution of American policy...
...Kennan's continued emphasis on the exquisite cast of dramatis personae, rather than on "underlying trends" or socio-economic categories...
...Kennan's major conclusion will be significant...
...the distortion of vision due "to the hysteria of militancy...
...The almost contingent nature of the decision to send American troops to Russia "against the better judgment of their own government" goes far to explain why, once the landings were made, U.S...
...There will be disagreements on the background of the Czech rising in May 1918, as well as on the Japanese decision to intervene...
...He insists aga n that diplomacy be left to the professionals—provided they know their business...
...More trade, more travel, more cultural contacts, the avoidance of some political stupidity and ugliness on both sides—perhaps...
...Recent evidence also suggests that Kennan's indignant dismissal of the "German thesis" is exaggerated, at least insofar as Lenin's acceptance of German funds (though of course not instructions) is concerned...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 22
