Two Hundred Years of American Policy: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917-1976

George F. Kennan

From Foreign Affairs, July 1976

Summary:  When, in the year 1917, Russian society was overtaken by the most tremendous and far-reaching upheaval it had ever known, American opinion-makers were poorly prepared to understand either the meaning or the implications of this event.

George F. Kennan is Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He was U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1952, and to Yugoslavia, 1961-63, and is the author of Soviet-American Relations, 1917-20 (2 Vols.); Memoirs (2 Vols.) and other works.

When, in the year 1917, Russian society was overtaken by the most tremendous and far-reaching upheaval it had ever known, American opinion-makers were poorly prepared to understand either the meaning or the implications of this event.

This was partly because there was little understanding in the United States of that day for Russian history or for the nature of the political society in which these events were taking place. Russian studies had been developed in North America only on the tiniest and most rudimentary of scales. Knowledge of Russia rested on the tales of the occasional traveler or on the reports of press correspondents, very few of whom were qualified to see deeply into the great political and social stirrings that tormented the life of Russia in those final decades of Tsardom. The traditional antipathy of Americans for the Tsarist autocracy was understandable enough; but it was seldom balanced by any realistic examination of the nature of the possible alternatives. And in the final years before World War I, governmental and journalistic opinion in the United States had tended to be preempted by the problem of the treatment of Jews within the Russian Empire, to the detriment of the attention given to other and even deeper aspects of the slow crisis in which Russian society was then embraced.

This was the situation as of 1914. But as the First World War ran its course, and particularly in the year 1917, there came to be imposed upon this general shallowness of understanding a far more serious source of confusion: and that was America's own involvement in the war. If it be conceded that one of the most stubbornly ingrained characteristics of American democracy has been its inability to accept and experience military involvement without becoming seriously disoriented by it and without permitting it to distort judgment on other questions of policy, then it must be said that never did this weakness reveal itself more sharply and fatefully than in American outlooks on Russia during the First World War. Entering the war only a few weeks after the first of the two Russian revolutions of 1917, Americans resolutely declined, from that time on, to view Russian developments from any standpoint other than that of the war against Germany, and not of a thoughtful and objective image of that war, at that, but rather as it was perceived through the grotesquely distorting lenses of wartime propaganda and hysteria.

Thus both Russian revolutions of that fateful year were seriously misperceived. The first-the fall, that is, of Tsardom and its replacement by a regime which was liberal-democratic at least in intent-was welcomed less in its possible significance for the future of Russia than because it was seen-wholly incorrectly-as releasing forces of enthusiasm for the war effort previously suppressed by a supposedly pro-German imperial court. The second revolution, in November, which brought the Bolsheviks to power, was misunderstood by reason of the widespread belief that the Bolshevik leaders were German agents; as a result of which the new regime, not generally expected to last very long in any case, was opposed less for what it really was than out of resentment for its action in taking Russia out of the war.

It was only after the termination of hostilities against Germany that the way was cleared, in theory at least, for a view of Russian communism as a political phenomenon in its own right. But by this time a new welter of bewildering and misleading factors had entered in: such things as the passions and uncertainties of the Russian civil war; the exaggerations of propaganda on both sides; our own semi-involvement in the Allied intervention; the measures of the new Communist regime with relation to Tsarist debts and foreign property; etc. It was not, really, until the early 1920s, after the termination of the Russian civil war and the overcoming of the famine of 1921-22, that the meaning of what had occurred in Russia since 1917 began to emerge from the turmoil of events with sufficient clarity to permit the beginnings of thoughtful and reasonably informed debate in the United States over the nature of the problem which the installment of Lenin and his associates in the traditional seats of Russian power presented for American statesmanship.

II

Before going on to consider the nature of this problem and of the responses with which it met, it would be well to have a glance at one particular involvement of the United States which occurred in the confusion of those immediate post-revolutionary years and the main effect of which was to muddy the waters of mutual understanding for decades to come. This was America's part in the Allied intervention of 1918-20. Precisely because this action has so often been depicted by Soviet propagandists as an unsuccessful effort by the American government to unseat the Soviet regime, it is important to recognize its essential origins and dimensions.

The United States sent troops only to two areas of Russia: to the European north, in the neighborhood of Arkhangelsk on the White Sea, and to eastern Siberia. Both of these areas were far from the main theaters of the Russian civil war then in progress. In neither case was the decision to dispatch these troops taken gladly or-one may say-independently, in Washington. In neither case was it motivated by an intention that these forces should be employed with a view to unseating the Soviet government. In neither case would the decision have been taken except in conjunction with the World War then in progress, and for purposes related primarily to the prosecution of that war.

First-as to northern Russia. President Wilson consented to the dispatch of American forces to that region only in the face of a massive misunderstanding on his part of the situation prevailing there, only with great misgivings and skepticism as to the usefulness of the undertaking, and only when it had been insistently urged upon him by the British and French, with the support of Marshal Foch, then Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, all of whom portrayed it as a measure required by the war effort against Germany. What brought him to the decision was well described by his Secretary of War, Newton Baker, in a letter written some years later. He had convinced the President, Baker wrote, that the decision was unwise: . . . but he told me that he felt obliged to do it anyhow because the British and French were pressing it upon his attention so hard and he had refused so many of their requests that they were beginning to feel that he was not a good associate, much less a good ally.

The three battalions of American troops (for that is all it amounted to) were sent to Arkhangelsk, and served there, under British command. The decisions as to how and for what purposes they should be employed were British decisions, not American ones. The uses to which they were put were ones of which Wilson was ignorant at the time, ones he had never envisaged, ones of which, had he known of them, he would unquestionably have disapproved. That the units remained there after the end of the war with Germany was due to the fact that they were held there, over the winter of 1918-19, by the frozen condition of the White Sea. When the ice broke up they were removed as soon as this could be accomplished.