In 1941, Kennan was in Berlin, observing the operations of the Nazi government, which had taken over Germany eight years earlier. France and England were already at war with the Nazi government. Russia, i.e. the USSR, had recently switched sides, from being a friend of the Nazis to an enemy of the Nazis.
America was already supporting Britain in its war effort to liberate Germany from the Nazis. It was becoming increasingly clear that the United States would probably soon become directly involved in the war.
When Russia changed its allegiance, and started fighting against both the Germans and the Nazis, the English government under the leadership of Winston Churchill issued statements warmly welcoming the Soviet Socialists to the anti-Nazi cause. It is probable that many English political leaders had private misgivings about an alliance with the Soviets.
The question facing the United States was this: in American efforts to stop the Nazis, should the U.S. embrace the Soviet Socialists as allies? Like many officials in the upper levels of government, George Kennan was aware of the mass murders which the Soviets had carried out in Ukraine and other places. Kennan wrote to Washington from Berlin:
It seems to me that to welcome Russia as an associate in the defense of democracy would invite misunderstanding of our own position and would lend to the German war effort a gratuitous and sorely needed aura of morality. In following such course I do not see how we could help but identify ourselves with the Russian destruction of the Baltic States, with the attack against Finnish independence, with the partitioning of Poland and Romania, with the crushing of religion throughout Eastern Europe, and with the domestic policy of a regime which is widely feared and detested throughout this part of the world and the methods of which are far from democratic. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that in every border country concerned, from Scandinavia — including Norway and Sweden — to the Black Sea, Russia is generally more feared than Germany.
Kennan’s report reveals that, even after fighting had begun on the Eastern Front, the nations of central and eastern Europe were more worried about the Soviets than about the Nazis.
Such worries turned out to be correct. Although the war in that part of the world killed many thousands of people between 1939 and 1945, the postwar Soviet occupation of that same part of the world killed millions more. The postwar peace under Soviet Socialist domination turned out to be deadlier than the war itself.
Writing in late 1941, after the Soviet Socialists had started fighting against Germany, but before the U.S. had declared war, Kennan wanted to persuade the Roosevelt administration “that we should do nothing at home to make it appear that we are following the course Churchill seems to have entered upon in extending moral support to the Russian cause in the present Russian-German conflict.”
If it would indeed become necessary — and it did become necessary — to make common cause with the Soviet Socialists against the Nazis, then, Kennan urges, the U.S. should in no way endorse the USSR’s goals and ideologies — the U.S. should in no way portray the Soviets as friends or supporters of democracy. It should be made clear what was in fact the reality: any bonds to the USSR extended only as far as the war effort against the Nazis, and no further. This is how the Soviets could be seen as allies as late as September 1945, but become the aggressors and enemies in the Cold War as early as 1946 or 1947, depending on which date one chooses to mark the start of the Cold War.
The Soviets had made it clear that they did not support free elections, a free society, a free market, or free trade. The Soviets had both said and shown that they were willing to be allies of the Nazis as much as they were willing to be allies of the United States — they would do one or the other based only on which one would give them the most geopolitical power.
The fact that the Soviets had been allies of the Nazis until June 1941 revealed that they were not interested in a postwar world organized around governments of freely-elected representatives. The Soviets planned to receive help from the western Allies against Germany, but once Germany was defeated, the Soviet plan would be to destabilize the governments in those western Allies. The USSR hoped either to foster revolutions in France, in the U.K., and in the U.S., or to subvert the electoral process and thereby install pro-Soviet governments in those countries.
It had similar goals for Italy, Greece, Belgium, etc.
Therefore, Kennan wanted the Roosevelt administration to clearly articulate that the U.S. was cooperating with the Soviet Union only for the purposes of defeating the Nazis, and that beyond this one goal, there was no affinity between the two nations:
It is obvious that the Russian involvement in this struggle is not the result of any concern for the principles underlying the Allied cause and that Russia, despite its present involvement, has little desire to see England emerge as a real victor. Russia has tried unsuccessfully to purchase security by compromising with Germany and by encouraging the direction of the German war effort toward the west. Throughout the war the Moscow government has been most vehement in insisting that its own policy was based on sheer self-interest and in expressing its determination to do nothing to aid any warring power. It has thus no claim on Western sympathies; and there is no reason apparent to me why its present plight should not be viewed realistically at home as that of one who has played a lone hand in a dangerous game and must now alone take the moral consequences. Such a view would not preclude the extension of material aid wherever called for by our own self-interest. It would, however, preclude anything which might identify us politically or ideologically with the Russian war effort. In short, it seems to me that Soviet Russia could more soundly be regarded as a “fellow traveler” in the accepted Moscow sense, rather than as a political associate.
In sum, George F. Kennan is advising the Roosevelt administration to proceed in some military cooperation with the Soviet Socialists, but to do so with eyes wide open. The Soviets should be viewed as a military power which happens, at the moment, to have the same enemy as the western Allies have. There is nothing more to the partnership than a temporary alignment of military goals. Cooperation will cease as soon as those goals are accomplished.
Despite Kennan’s prescient warnings, the Roosevelt administration engaged in some public discourse which painted the Soviets in a better light, and engaged in conferences with Stalin which gave the Soviets a hand in shaping the postwar world.
Had the Roosevelt administration heeded Kennan’s advice more carefully, many lives would have been saved, and the world would not have endured the setbacks to the cause of freedom which happened during the Cold War.
