George F. Kennan, America’s foremost strategist in the Cold War, harbored a love for the Russian people so strong that at times he felt that his “Russian self” was “more genuine” than his American identity. Working at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the late 1930s, Kennan experienced Stalin’s purges of Soviet leaders as “hammer blows” to himself because so many of his Russian friends and acquaintances were arrested and executed. For his own mental balance and for his reporting to Washington, the young diplomat struggled to reach a coolly rational understanding of the terror. The irony is that while Kennan amidst such strain did achieve a nuanced, sophisticated analysis of the purges, Kennan in later years would succumb to an emotion-driven, simplistic view.
This lecture examines why Kennan felt the purges in such an intensely personal way and the nature of his struggle for reason. The talk will also consider the dilemma of trying to parse the elements of integrated cognitive thought and the question of how closely scholars can approach the thinking of historical figures.
Frank Costigliola is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Norwegian Nobel Institute. His most recent books include Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Princeton, 2012); The Kennan Diaries (W.W. Norton, 2014); and [with Michael J. Hogan] Explaining American Foreign Relations History (Cambridge, 2016). He is a former president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).