George F. Kennan (1904 – 2005) was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as “The Wise Men”. During the late 1940s, his writings confirmed the Truman Doctrine and inspired the U.S. foreign policy of containing the USSR. His “Long Telegram” from Moscow in 1946 and the subsequent 1947 article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be “contained” in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States. These texts provided justification for the Truman administration‘s new anti-Soviet policy. Kennan played a major role in the development of definitive Cold War programs and institutions, notably the Marshall Plan.
In 1971, 25 years after his famous Long Telegram, George Kennan published his ‘The Marquis de Custine and His Russia in 1839‘ essay. Below are several quotes from it.
“In January of the year 1843 there was published in Paris, in four volumes, a book entitled La Russie en 1839. The author was a French nobleman of distinguished lineage, Astolphe Louis Leonor, Marquis de Custine. The book was an account of the impressions gained, and the reflections inspired, by a visit the Marquis had paid to Russia in the summer of 1839. It was at once a sensational success. Within a few years, it ran through at least six legitimate French editions. It was promptly pirated and republished, in several editions, in Brussels. German and English translations, or condensations, followed shortly…
Alexander Herzen, laying the work down after the first reading, pronounced it the best book ever written about Russia by a foreigner; but he then characteristically fell into despair at the thought that it had taken a foreigner to write it—that no Russian could have done it. The Emperor Nicholas I is said to have flung the volume to the floor in anger after perusing the first few pages, moaning something to the effect that “I am alone to blame; I encouraged and patronized the visit of this scoundrel.” Later, though, it seems that curiosity got the better of him and that he read considerable parts of it aloud to his family in the long dull evenings of palace life…
…At Balzac’s urging, he aimed for Russia, and Turgenev, the older cousin of the great Russian novelist, equipped him with letters of introduction to the intellectuals in St. Petersburg.
The inn at which Custine stopped, at Lubeck, was thus one much patronized by Russian travellers; and it was from his brief sojourn there that he derived what became one of the most famous passages of his book. The innkeeper, % with whom he fell into conversation, expressed wonder that Custine should wish to go to Russia. Custine asked why this should be a source of smq>rise to him. The innkeeper then explained that his Russian guests seemed to have two physiognomies.
“When they leave the ship on their way to Europe,” he said, “they have a cheerful, free, happy air about them, they are like escaped horses, like birds out of the cage, men, women, young, and old all are happy as students on a holiday, but the same persons, on their return are drooping sombre, tormented figures, preoccupied taciturn with worried faces..”
…there was, he recognized, also something even deeper and more subjective in the distaste for the truth, the preference for the facade, the insistence on the discreet silence, to which this officialdom was addicted. There was an unwillingness to admit, even before one’s own people, the full ugliness of Russian despotism.
Dissimulation on so vast a scale, as Custine observed it in Russia, could serve, he concluded, “only to mask a profound inhumanity; it is not the good that one takes such care to conceal.” And again; “A regime whose own violence is such that it be supported only by such means can only be a profoundly vicious regime.”
…he could not avoid asking himself to what extent the rigors of the regime constituted an unavoidable response to the nature of the people, and he was perfectly willing to recognize the psychology of the Russian masses as an extenuating circumstance “Clemency,” he observed toward the end of his journey represents weakness in the approach to a people hardened by terror, nothing disarms such a people but fear, implacable severity forces it to its knees, mercy, on the contrary, causes it to raise its head, one would not know how to convince it, one can do no other than to subdue It, incapable of pride, it is not incapable of audacity, it revolts against mildness, but gives obedience to ferocity, which it mistakes for true power.”
Russia had herself become a semi-Asiatic country. And having been for centuries oppressed and humiliated by the Tatar hordes, Russian rulers were now inspired by a subconscious desire to compensate for these humiliations by inflicting them on others—at home and abroad. Suffering, after all, did not make people humane. It was a habit of princes and of people to take their revenge upon the innocent. They fancied themselves strong when they created victims. Thus the Russians had now come to occupy with relation to Europe the place the Mongols had once occupied with relation to Russia The role of buffer between Europe and Asia, once filled by Russia herself, had come now to be assumed by the Poles.
“That nation, essentially aggressive, greedy under the influence of privation, expiates beforehand, by a debasing submission, the design of exercising a tyranny over other nations the glory, the riches, which are the objects of its hopes, console it for the disgrace to which it submits. To purify himself from the foul and impious sacrifice of all public and personal liberty, the slave, sunk to his knees, dreams of world domination.”
The patriarchal tyranny of the Asiatic governments, in contact with the theories of modern philanthropy, the character of the people of the East and West, incompatible by nature, yet united together by coercion in a state of society semi-barbarous, but kept in order by fear, present a spectacle that can be only seen in Russia, and, assuredly, one which no man who thinks, would regret the trouble of going to contemplate.
For even if we admit that ‘Russie en 1839‘ was not a very good book about Russia in 1839, we are confronted with the disturbing fact that it was an excellent book, probably in fact the best of books, about the Russia of Joseph Stalin, and not a bad book about the Russia of Brezhnev and Kosygin.
…Here, as though the book had been wntten yesterday (but in better and more striking language than most of us today would be able to command), appear all the familiar features of Stalinism the absolute power of a single man, his power over thoughts as well as actions, the impermanence and an substantiality of all subordmate distinctions of rank and dignity—the instantaneous transition from lofty station to disgrace and obhvion, the indecent association of sycophancy upwards with brutality downwards, the utter disenfranchisement and helplessness of the popular masses, the nervous punishment of innocent people for the offenses they might be considered capable of committing rather than ones they had committed, the neurotic relationship to the West; the frantic fear of foreign observation; the obsession with espionage; the secrecy; the systematic mystification; the general silence of intimidation; the preoccupation with appearances at the expense of reality; the systematic cultivation of falsehood as a weapon of policy; the tendency to rewrite the past. In the phenomenon of Stahnism all these features of the Russian scene, features which had impressed themselves only indistinctly on Custine’s consciousness in 1839 like the fragments of an evil nightmare, would emerge a hundred years later in full and visible reality, no longer to be semi-concealed, no longer to bring blushes to the faces of their authors when attention was called to them, but now to be held brazenly aloft in the daylight as favored principles of political leadership, indispensable means of leading the Russian people, or any other people, down the broad vistas of utopian socialism. And along with all this, there would go the semi-religious messianism, the pretension of universal validity for an official Russian faith, and the suppression of the liberties of neighboring peoples — the Poles in 1831, the Czechs in 1968—in the alleged interests of the internal security of the Russian state.
What are we to make of ibis strange anomaly; that the nightmare of 1839 should have become the reality of 1939, and the semi-reality of 1969?”
COMMENT: What if we try and substitute words ‘Stalin’ and ‘Stalinism’ with ‘Putin‘ and ‘Putinism‘ in the quote above?
