Given the speed, thoroughness, and permanence with which his strategy of containment became far more aggressive and militarized than he intended, one has to wonder whether the cold war was, in the end, driven by forces much larger than George Kennan. Would the cold war have developed differently had there been no George Kennan or had he chosen to keep his ideas about Russia and the Soviet Union to himself? Perhaps the real risk of biography as a genre is the fallacy of placing its protagonist at the center of everything.
The greatest enigma about Kennan was not his relationship to the doctrine of containment but his relationship to Russia. For much of his career he knew more about Russia and spoke better Russian than anyone in the United States government. Despite having no Russian ancestry, he felt that Russia was “in my blood. There was some mysterious affinity which I could not explain even to myself; and nothing could have given me deeper satisfaction than to indulge it.” When he studied Russian as a young Foreign Service officer, it was “as though one had known it in some dead past and as though the learning of it was some sort of rediscovery.” In Russian, “words sounded as they ought to sound.”
Deep immersion in a foreign language and culture has been known to have this effect. In her delightful memoir French Lessons (1993), Alice Kaplan describes how “French got me away from my family and taught me how to talk. Made me an adult.” It gave her “my French persona.” For Kennan, the effect was even more potent. His “Russian self,” he confided to his diary, was “much more genuine than the American one.” He dreamed of searching for his mother (who died two months after Kennan’s birth in Milwaukee) in a crowd of Russian peasants; he dreamed of writing a book about his favorite author, Anton Chekhov. He named his farm in Pennsylvania the Cherry Orchard. Upon visiting Leo Tolstoy’s estate near Tula, he found “a world to which, I always thought, I could really have belonged…much more naturally and wholeheartedly.”
The enduring fantasy of an uninhibited Russian version of himself suggests a certain loathing for the American original. Even before setting foot there for the first time, Kennan powerfully projected onto Russia an imagined identity free of bourgeois pettiness and sexual hypocrisy. He loved the Russia he found in its literature; he loved the Russian people (as opposed to their rulers in the Kremlin) for their “childishness, the laziness, the gregariousness, the love of music and dancing and declaiming, the superstition, the imagination, and the loquaciousness.” For all this psychic investment, he seems not to have had a single close Russian friend.