Kennan on Russia

...With skill and imagination, we might well choose to have two enemies in Moscow and Peking, rather than just the lone Communist devil...

...What alarms him is the Americans' "curious trait" of unlimited optimism about the fortunes of a government adopted as friend or protege (and vice versa...

...The record he has completed of ill-conceived policy and inept diplomacy by the West supports this thesis...

...It distills truth from episodes of history which we have never understood and which the Russians deliberately and maliciously have misunderstood...

...Great events, revealed through diligent scholarship and related by a superb story-teller—these are elements enough for any book...

...If there is any one thing we have been taught in these forty years of the existence of Soviet power, it is that it is useful and necessary, in a complex world, to have dealings with enemies as well as with friends," Kennan writes...

...Kennan's narrative ends with World War II, but, as might be imagined, he appears convinced that we still have not learned our lesson...

...The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, emerge from this narrative as admirable realists, capable of discarding their own foolish notions (as, for instance, about instant world revolution), ready to seek "peace and friendship" when it suited their needs, and adept even at turning relative military helplessness into diplomatic virtue...

...And thus, Kennan thinks, did the Allies ensure the final Bolshevik conquest of Russia, which had not been at all sure...

...One of Kennan's main preoccupations in this book is the Allies' obsessive demand for Germany's unconditional surrender in World War I. With this single-minded concession to the good-guys doctrine, he shows they fell victim to a passion of righteous nationalism that caused them to beat not only the enemy but also themselves...

...Finally, in the most absurd aspect of the pursuit of insensate victory, the Allies sent their own troops into Russia's Arctic and Siberian wastes to bolster a phantom front against the Germans long after it had disappeared...

...Thus did they involve themselves in a bizarre adventure that makes the Cuban invasion of this year look like a brilliant maneuver...

...Let us beware in the future of wholly condemning an entire people and wholly exculpating others...

...And so they allowed the Bolshevik extremists to strike the posture of reason and peace, which alone accounted for their triumph...

...What upsets him is the Americans' peculiar habit of segregating military war from diplomatic war and their "congenital reluctance" to entertain the suggestion that political considerations might occasionally take precedence over military advantage...

...Let us remember that the great moral issues on which civilization is going to stand or fall cut across all military and ideological borders, across peoples, classes, and regimes—across, in fact, the make-up of the human individual himself...

...Equating Russia's weakness with wickedness, they drove her into misery and isolationism and destroyed the kindred Russian moderates just as with the same formula in Germany they destroyed the forces of moderation by visiting upon them a punishment conceived for the Kaiser...

...or, again: "Just because you have an enemy and recognize him as such does not necessarily mean that you are obliged to destroy him or can afford the luxury of allout attempts to do so...

...What is more, as democrats, they have found their impulses "brutally negated by opinion at home" and by the lack of discipline within their own establishments...

...What shocks him is the repeated reliance, by the custodians of our security, on information gleaned only from friends...

...Reviewed by Max Frankel GEORGE F. KENNAN'S Russia and the West is the story of a kaleidoscopic, forty-year war in which Soviet Communists have seized important victories—often out of the jaws of bitter defeat—from smug, superficial, myopic, and essentially incompetent adversaries in the democratic nations...

...The daily newspaper is evidence...

...Written to be spoken, in lectures at Oxford in 1957-58 and at Harvard in 1960, it is brilliantly readable history, too— full of the wit, drama, comic relief, and epigrammatic recapitulation with which Kennan habitually leads audiences through the replays of championship diplomatic chess...

...Again and again, he pleads for that certain relativism, apparently convinced that the rest of us refuse to learn...

...Kennan, who is now our ambassador to Yugoslavia, argues that these sloppy habits of mind and policy are both the results and causes of pitifully inadequate diplomatic techniques, which seem never to interest us...

...That succession of events, from the alienation of Germany and Russia to their cynical alliance in the HitlerStalin pact and the start of World War II, was not inevitable but, Kennan argues, historically logical...

...It is, therefore, an exciting, ironic history, entertaining even though chagrining...

...No people at all—not even ourselves—is entirely our friend...

...Nothing has changed since then to alter the Communists' own judgment that they and the Allies are enemies essentially at war...

...If we are tempted to think of our current jousting with the Russians as uniquely complex, Kennan does well to show us how early in the game there was established "that ambiguity and contradictoriness of Soviet policy which has endured to the present day: the combination of the doctrine of co-existence—the claim, that is, to the right to have normal outward relations with capitalist countries—with the most determined effort behind the scenes to destroy the Western governments and the social and political systems supporting them...

...Let us not repeat the mistake of believing that either good or evil is total," he declares near the end...

...Its power and purpose are polemic...

...It argues for a rigorous diplomacy that would champion the great moral issues of human conflict— issues, Kennan emphasizes, that have nothing in common with great moral crusades by us, the good guys, against them, the bad ones, but rather issues that require "a certain relativism" about enmity, as about friendship, which in turn would endow our diplomacy with a sophistication it has never long enjoyed in this crucial, continuing war...

...Hardly...

...Summit diplomacy, coalition diplomacy, separate war and peace diplomacy, and, indeed, democratic diplomacy, he shows, are incapable of sustaining these qualities...

...The incredible success of events in the years following Lenin's seizure of power consume more than half of Kennan's book, not only because he has mastered the period in recent years of scholarship but also because he seems convinced that they explain almost everything that followed...

...There are new opportunities, he believes...

...What is more, he maintains, the Allies learned nothing from the experience, fought the second World War, like the first, as a mere military exercise, embraced the Communists as total allies just as blindly as they had earlier dismissed them as total enemies, and again set out in search of peace with little appreciation of their diplomatic environment...

...With enlightened diplomacy, he argues, we could reap advantage of the fact that Moscow, too, is now saddled with friends and allies...

...Harried senior statesmen at the summit, he says, have flitted since Wilson's time from problem to problem "like bees from one flower to another," making it impossible to arrange for the day-to-day decisions that would give policy a consistency of style and methodology...

...From his history, Kennan says he has learned that coalitions are capable of deciding only what not to do, and they tend therefore to do nothing...

...But they do not fully explain the vitality of this book...

...A difficult concept...

...Kennan's plea for relativism and sophistication in diplomacy is not intended to deny that war, but only to give us a fighting chance to win it...

...The task of diplomacy, he says, "is really one of style, of perseverance, and of ceaseless vigilance...

...More than most students of Russia, he blames Stalin's personality for much of that nation's malevolence and believes that the image of Stalin's Russia should "stand for us as a marker of the distance we have come...

...With all eyes on the battle but blind to its purpose and consequence, they refused to release even a prostrate, leaderless Russia from its obligations in the "crusade...

...No other people, as a whole, is entirely our enemy...