Books: A Nightmare to Remember

RUSSIA LEAVES THE WAR (544 pp.)—George F. Kennan—Princeton University ($7.50).

The West manages to persuade itself every few years that the Communists are changing, that internal troubles, outside pressure or a deliberate switch of policy are causing a new Communist era. Once again the air is full of such talk. The idea is that most of the evils in Soviet Russia were caused by one man, and this line is fostered by a lot of people, from statesmen (who call on the present rulers of Russia to turn their backs on the wrongs of Stalinism) down to movie producers (who are dreaming up movies about Joe's crimes).

To get a perspective on these notions, it is well to turn away from the headlines and go back to the beginning. That is the task undertaken by George F. Kennan, onetime (1952) U.S. Ambassador to Russia, now professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies. Russia Leaves the War is the first volume (two more to come) of his history of Russia's time of troubles. It might as justly have been called Russia Leaves the West, for with the triumph in 1917 of Lenin's Bolsheviks over Russia's first and only democratic (Kerensky) government, the Czar's old empire made its fateful turn toward ancient patterns of tyranny and away from the liberal currents of the West.

In clear and resourceful prose, Kennan has threaded through a huge maze of diplomatic papers to present a clear picture of America's first frustrations in dealing with the new power. The very first year of the Red Revolution set the future pattern: Western liberal gullibility trying to cope with men who have raised deceit to the level of a philosophy.

Fool's Mate. Kennan's book begins by evoking the grimness of the Russian scene seen at its capital, Petrograd, where at every hand "one feels the proximity of the great wilderness of the Russian north—silent, somber, infinitely patient." Lenin and Trotsky were emerging as the main figures on that somber scene. These agile clever, ruthless and dedicated men—Stalin was still a poisonous penumbra on the horizon of history—were theoretically bent on directing Russia as an ally of the U.S. and the Anglo-French alliance against imperial Germany and Austria. The problem of the U.S. was to keep Russia in the war, and so block the movement of Germany's Eastern divisions to the Western Front. The problem of the Bolshevik leaders was simply to get out of the war—as they had promised their supporters—and still conquer and keep power.

The Bolsheviks won this game of chess by a fool's mate. The fools, of one sort or another, were the gullible men of the Western embassies. In the evening of Nov. 7, 1917, the Czar's Winter Palace was "stormed"—by the back door. Kennan sardonically notes, for, amid the confusion and vacillation of the defenders, someone had inadvertently left the back door open. At the time, British Ambassador Sir George Buchanan was gloomily watching artillery from the River Neva (blanks from the Russian cruiser Aurora, usually credited with a main role in the palace's capture). U.S. Ambassador David R. Francis was asleep, and a U.S. Red Cross missionary, Raymond Robins, was writing in his diary: "A great day for Russia and the world."