9

HONEYMOON WITH STALIN

One summer day in 1932 three strangers drove a car up to the wall of the Kremlin. Surprising the guards, they spoke English. One of them produced a permit, and the guards let another man, an impeccably dressed foreigner, proceed toward the grave of John Reed, who was buried in the Kremlin wall among Bolshevik heroes. The two other men watched from a distance as William Bullitt, “sentimental to the core,” laid a large wreath on the grave of John Reed. Head bowed, Bullitt stood before Reed’s grave “for many minutes”; when he returned to his companions, “tears were rolling down his cheeks and his features were drawn with sorrow.”¹

This was Bullitt’s third visit to Moscow—surprising for an American who was, though related to John Reed, never a Communist. It is not clear what else Bullitt was doing in Russia, besides weeping at the grave of his ex-wife’s former husband. He wrote to Colonel House that he wished to sort out Lenin’s papers in the Moscow archive, but nothing came of these plans. The presidential campaign had just started in America, and Bullitt was on his way back from Vienna to campaign for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Counting on Roosevelt’s victory and anticipating his turn to the left, Bullitt expected that relations with the USSR would be on Roosevelt’s agenda. From 1917 to 1933 there were no diplomatic relations between the Bolshevik government of Russia and the United States. In the midst of the Great Depression, Roosevelt declared that he would resume these relations. Bullitt saw an opportunity to use his connections to rekindle the US-Soviet relationship.

George Andreychin, a Bulgarian Communist who got Bullitt permission to visit John Reed’s grave at the Kremlin, was a longtime friend and a helpful guide in Moscow. On the eve of the First World War, Andreychin emigrated to the United States, fleeing conscription to the Austria-Hungarian army. There he befriended Charlie Chaplin, Reed, and other leftists. In Minnesota in 1918 Andreychin organized a miners’ strike and was facing twenty years in jail under wartime laws. Released on bail thanks to Chaplin, Andreychin fled to revolutionary Russia. Later, Max Eastman thanked Andreychin for helping to obtain Lenin’s “Letter to the Congress,” the Bolshevik leader’s political testament that was essentially an anti-Stalin pamphlet and one of the major assets of the Trotskyite movement. In the 1920s Andreychin worked in important but prosaic positions in the State Planning Committee in Moscow and in the Soviet Embassy in London. He received Soviet citizenship but preserved his American citizenship as well; still, he could not go back to the States because he was a fugitive from justice. A convinced Trotskyite, he was exiled to Kazakhstan in 1927 but continued to correspond with Trotsky. In 1932 he wrote a letter of repentance and returned to Moscow. When he brought Bullitt to Reed’s grave, he was working at Intourist, the Moscow travel agency that was filled with informers and seductresses.

In September 1932 Bullitt started working at Roosevelt’s campaign headquarters. He met Roosevelt in October, and they immediately took a liking to each other: both were “brilliantly and boldly intuitional,” recalled their mutual friend Louis B. Wehle, who organized the meeting. Colonel House also supported Bullitt’s return to politics; still, it was “a temperamental congeniality,” as Wehle put it, that made these two men “warm friends” after their first conversation. Bullitt immediately started correspondence with Roosevelt and donated one thousand dollars to his campaign. More importantly, he flattered Roosevelt from the very beginning. After listening to one of Roosevelt’s radio addresses, Bullitt wrote: “It was the most inspiriting address that I have heard since Wilson’s speeches in 1918. You not only said the right things but also said them with a 1776 spirit.”² Promising a New Deal to Americans, Roosevelt saw himself as launching the new revolution, and Bullitt honestly shared his hope for a transformation of the political system. But Bullitt detested Wilson and his speeches in 1918, while Roosevelt was, in contrast, grateful to Wilson, with whom he began his public career. He probably took Bullitt’s praise at face value, while in fact it was a tongue-in-cheek one-man show, Bullitt’s specialty.

In his letters to Roosevelt, Bullitt combined flattery with irony in a way that both entertained the addressee and educated him about the world affairs that were becoming crucial to his job. Bullitt’s girlfriend and Roosevelt’s secretary, Margaret LeHand, admired these letters—“a confidential dispatch which reads like a most exciting novel.”³ Historian David Fromkin noted that Bullitt “tended to discuss events in terms of personalities.”⁴ As ambassador, Bullitt fully realized this journalistic skill in his diplomatic dispatches, which matched Roosevelt’s lively, intuitive, and personal way of directing world affairs. Aware of his lack of international experience, Roosevelt could not stand the tedious advisers. “Moments of boredom were a desperate ordeal” for Roosevelt. “His mind was sure to range ahead of any slow speaker,” recalled Louis Wehle.⁵ Secretary of State Cordell Hull was boring and logical; Roosevelt respected his experience but preferred to receive his information about foreign affairs from more exciting interlocutors, like Bullitt. At this moment Bullitt’s career depended on matching Roosevelt’s tempo, wit, and thirst for detail.

One of Bullitt’s talents was his ability to cooperate with older and more powerful people such as House, Freud, and Roosevelt. In dealing with these “substitutes for a father figure,” as Freud would have called them, Bullitt did not obey or rebel but established friendship—a relationship of equals. He was not so good at cultivating his relationships with those whom he mentored, his symbolic sons; this asymmetry in his relationships would become worse, much to his own dismay, in his later years. Generally sincere despite his routine mischievousness, he was also less successful at forging more formal relationships among the British elite and the Soviet bureaucratic class, though he made lasting friendships with leaders elsewhere on the Continent. In America his personal diplomacy seemed to work well. While he seemed dramatic to some and sentimental to others, Roosevelt nicknamed him “Bill Buddha,” which indicated an even-tempered, smiley, and all-accepting kind of character.⁶ To pull all of these various traits together, Bullitt had to show an unusual self-control—what his friend Charles Bohlen described as his ability to turn his brilliance on and off at will.⁷

Roosevelt was elected in November 1932. Two months later, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Attacking the Treaty of Versailles was one of Hitler’s favorite themes. In America and England the success of German revenge-seekers signaled the death of Wilson’s idealism, and the old opponents of the Treaty of Versailles experienced a bitter moment of truth. Roosevelt’s inauguration took place in March, and in April Bullitt was appointed assistant secretary of state—roughly the same position that he had left almost fifteen years earlier.

Bullitt’s first assignment was to prepare for the World Economic Conference, which was held in London under the auspices of the League of Nations in the summer of 1933. Bullitt worked on this event together with James Warburg, one of Roosevelt’s financial advisers and a nephew of Jacob Schiff, the Wall Street tycoon who years earlier had financed the émigré Bolsheviks fomenting revolution in Russia. Warburg’s portrait of Bullitt was delightful: “he is a naughty boy; he loves to create a scene and he can put on an act of indignation such as I’ve rarely seen, and come out roaring with laughter over it. He had little concern about the success of the conference; he had no concern about anything economic. He’s one of these curious people to whom the drama is more exciting than the results.” Warburg characterized Bullitt as a maverick, but appreciated his contribution to the conference because Bullitt was “the only person on the horizon a) who knows Europe thoroughly, and b) who has real talent as a negotiator.”⁸

The World Economic Conference ended in failure. A little earlier, Roosevelt had abandoned the gold standard, which paved the way for what is known today as “quantitative easing.” The sudden fall of the dollar spawned chaos in international finance. However, Keynes applauded Roosevelt’s decision, and Bullitt also supported it. Surprising everyone, Alfred Hugenberg, the German minister of economics and a longtime ally of Hitler, announced on the conference that the global Depression would end when Germany received its African colonies back and acquired new “living space” in Eastern Europe. According to historian Arthur Schlesinger, Bullitt made mistakes in London that had become characteristic: he angered one British statesman by suggesting that the American delegation room had been wired by the British and enraged another by taking his secretary out for a dinner and trying to pry British state secrets from her.⁹

The New Deal needed money, which could only come from the federal state. Implementing his revolution from above, Roosevelt dramatically increased governmental spending, abandoned the Prohibition laws, and created millions of jobs. The radicalization of Germany, the turn toward greater state involvement in the economy, and vague expectations of a new war, all drew attention to Russia and its socialist experiment. Despite the absence of diplomatic relations, trade between the United States and the Soviet Union had been thriving. As unemployment rose in the United States, thousands of pro-Soviet Americans immigrated to the Soviet Union. Many of them wanted to build state socialism, while others simply sought employment. From the Karelian woods to the Dnieper dams to the Ural mines to the Volga plants, the talent and skills of these Americans made a big contribution to Stalin’s industrialization. Over time, many of these people perished in the Gulag, but the American government and the press either did not know or refused to believe that this was happening. The Soviet Union was a significant potential market for American goods and a possible military ally, a counterweight to Germany in Europe and to Japan in Asia. An alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union could change the balance of power in Europe and the world; looking back, one could easily see how the timely formation of such an alliance could have prevented or alleviated the worst catastrophes of the Second World War. Some New Dealers also saw in the Soviet Union a model for their domestic reforms. These progressive Americans believed that collectivization, industrial experiments, and five-year plans would bring peace, growth, and a thriving culture to the Soviet Union.

In the absence of diplomatic relations, Soviet-American trade was largely controlled from Moscow. Bullitt stated later that the Soviets needed many American industrial products, but in the 1920s, the sales of these products were supported by “strange financing. . . . We found that we had given away our products when we thought we had sold them” (76). Amtorg, the Soviet trade agency, had operated legally in the United States since 1924. From its offices in Manhattan and Moscow, Amtorg ran huge import-export operations. Its agents also collected technical and military intelligence and were quick to use force if money did not work. The FBI watched the Soviet agency closely, but strange Russian stories nonetheless unfolded on American soil. Ephraim Sklyansky, the first head of Amtorg and a close friend of Trotsky, sank in a boat on a lake in New Jersey in 1925; murder was never proved.¹⁰ In 1930 a special congressional committee investigated Amtorg. The committee reported that most of the agency’s correspondence was encoded, and the American Navy specialists were unable to crack the code. Still, American exports to Russia were large and growing: from trucks to turbines, tractors to airplanes, rails to cranes, American technology had become the backbone of Soviet industrialization. In return Russian exports to the United States comprised mostly gold and furs, sometimes supplemented by works of classical art that had been confiscated from their prerevolutionary owners. The United States did not have a trade agency in Russia, and importing Soviet goods to America was an obscure business that attracted eccentrics like oilman Armand Hammer and fur trader Motty Eitingon. Surprised by this situation, Secretary of State Cordell Hull wrote that the establishment of regular relations would be more profitable to the United States than the Soviet Union: “It was easier for Russians to do business in the United States without diplomatic protection than it was for Americans to do business in Russia.”¹¹

However, the Soviet-American rapprochement was attractive for Kremlin strategists as well. The establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States would ensure the triumph of the Soviets in their long, successful campaign for international recognition. It would mark the victory of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, which was led by Maxim Litvinov, a cosmopolitan Bolshevik who, before the revolution, had spent ten years in London. America was also a source of technical information and, possibly, military and economic assistance. Moscow was very much concerned about possible conflict with Japan. Generals always prepare for the wars of the past, and the Kremlin remembered the grave lessons of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Soviet commissars saw the rapprochement with the United States as a counterweight to the Japanese threat on the Soviet Pacific Coast, which they could not defend alone. In the long run these hopes proved to be surprisingly pertinent, though Japan would attack the United States and not the Soviet Union, and the Kremlin would end up needing American help in Europe, not Asia.

From an American perspective, there were many obstacles to the recognition of the Soviet Union. In a memorandum dated October 4, 1933, Bullitt listed them in order of significance. First, in 1917 the Bolsheviks had disavowed Russian debts to the American government; Bullitt hoped to return these debts by offering restructuring and deferrals. Second, the Soviet governmental organizations, the Comintern and Amtorg, spread Communist propaganda in the United States; as a condition for diplomatic relations, Moscow had to stop this propaganda. Finally, the USSR also had to ensure the protection of civil and religious liberties of Americans in Moscow and across the country. Tactically, Bullitt detected a vicious circle: to discuss controversial issues with Russia, America needed the diplomatic relations, but these relations could not be established until the Soviets resolved the disputed issues.

Breaking this circle, Bullitt worked with Boris Skvirsky, the head of another Soviet agency in Washington, the Soviet Information Bureau. They agreed on the text of two identical letters that were exchanged between Roosevelt and the “Soviet president,” Mikhail Kalinin. Litvinov came to Washington and opened the first telephone line between Washington and Moscow. On November 18, 1933, newspapers reported the establishment of diplomatic relations between the USSR and the United States. The president nominated Bullitt as American ambassador to the Soviet Union. In a rare interview with the New York Times, Stalin praised the establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States and Bullitt’s role in the process. Stalin said he had heard “much” about Bullitt from Lenin, who also “liked” him. The Soviet leader appreciated that Bullitt was “a direct man who says what he thinks” and did not talk “like an ordinary diplomat.” Stalin also complimented Roosevelt: he was “a realist,” Stalin said, and saw the world as it was.¹²

On December 3, Bullitt’s old friend George Andreychin congratulated him from Moscow. “I am genuinely distressed,” he wrote, “not to be the first to welcome you as the first American ambassador to the Russian Revolution. You are certainly the man for the job.” In response, Bullitt expressed the hope that they might “consume some vodka and caviar together soon.”¹³ Reminiscing about their joint trip to Russia some fifteen years earlier, Lincoln Steffens congratulated Bullitt with an unusual parable: “There was a man who was after a guy who was in prison, so he had himself sent to this prison, but his enemy was in another prison. So he served out his term, had himself convicted of another crime,” and then did it for the third time—but finally stabbed his enemy. So, concluded Steffens, that man beat Bullitt’s record, but Bullitt was “the second most persistent son-of-a-gun in my history.” Bullitt could relax, Steffens added: the third most persistent man was Litvinov.¹⁴

Bullitt did not expect problems with his nomination in the Senate. Only the British diplomats, who remembered him in Paris or had heard about his Anglophobia, were unhappy. One of them reported from London: “I think Mr. Bullitt may do less harm in Moscow than in Washington, though he is a kind of man who does harm anywhere.” From Washington, the British ambassador responded that Bullitt was “completely unscrupulous where there is question of taking his objective” (58).

Bullitt’s counterpart, who had been nominated Soviet ambassador to the United States, was Alexander Troyanovsky. Characteristically, he was the former ambassador to Japan (1927–1933); in his youth, Troyanovsky, an artillery officer by training, took part in the Russian-Japanese war of 1904–1905. The appointment of a Japan specialist to serve as ambassador to Washington showed that the perceived Japanese threat was much stronger in Moscow than in Washington: Bullitt was an expert in Europe, not Japan. But in Moscow, he talked about the Japanese threat regularly.

Bullitt based his selection of employees solely on “intuition,” and this faculty rarely betrayed him. In November 1933 George Kennan found the new ambassador packing up his luggage at the State Department. Learning that Kennan spoke Russian, Bullitt immediately offered him a job in Moscow. Kennan had been serving in Riga with a small group of “observers” who monitored developments in the Soviet Union and wrote reports to the State Department. Bored there, he was thrilled by the new appointment. The posting started in a few days and would launch the stellar career of Kennan, who became one of the most influential diplomats of the Cold War. Just as quickly, during a short meeting in Moscow, Bullitt recruited Charles Thayer. Thayer did not even speak Russian, but he turned into an excellent translator and an accomplished career diplomat.

With a small entourage, Bullitt sailed from New York aboard the President Harding to Le Havre. Winter was approaching, the ocean was stormy, and Bullitt called for the red wine to be replaced with champagne, which he thought would be better during the storm. Kennan could not leave his cabin out of sickness, and Bullitt visited him. Kennan recalled:

He talked to me with that charm which was peculiarly his own. It was our first really personal conversation and I was naturally curious about the character of this brilliant and fast-moving man who had so suddenly become my immediate superior. I carried away from the talk an impression of enormous charm, confidence, and vitality. But I also had an impression of quick sensitivity, of great egocentricity and pride, and of a certain dangerous freedom—the freedom of a man who, as he himself confessed to me on that occasion, had never subordinated his life to the needs of any other human being. (xv)

In Moscow the delegation stayed near the Kremlin, at the Hotel National, where the American flag was flown. Bullitt was touched that he was placed in the very same room where he had stayed with his mother in 1914, nearly twenty years earlier. Pravda wrote enthusiastically about the establishment of diplomatic relations with the United States; the new ambassador was “a longtime friend of the Soviet Union” and “Lenin’s partner in the negotiations.” It was Bullitt’s fourth time in Moscow, and he loved every bit of it. After he presented his credentials to Kalinin, he wrote to Roosevelt that he thought Kalinin was “a simple-minded old peasant,” endowed with “a delightful shrewdness and sense of humor” (63). Kalinin told Bullitt that the American president was “completely out of the class of the leaders of [other] capitalist states” because Roosevelt really cared about American workers and farmers. Kalinin also told Bullitt that Lenin “many times” expressed his sympathies for Bullitt, in conversations and also in his “Testament.” This is what Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt; in fact, Lenin’s “Testament” does not mention Bullitt, and Kalinin would have been unable to cite the document, which was directed against Stalin and was not acknowledged as genuine during the entire Soviet period. Bullitt also wrote that the Soviet diplomat Ivan Divilkovsky told him: “You cannot understand it, but there is not one of us who would not gladly have his throat cut to have had such things said about him by Lenin.” To help Roosevelt understand this passage, Bullitt offered an analogy that he could have borrowed from his book about Wilson: “Lenin’s present position in Russia [was] not unlike that of Jesus Christ in the Christian church,” and therefore he, Bullitt, enjoyed something similar to “the personal endorsement of the Master recorded in St. Mark” (64). One could only imagine Roosevelt’s laughter when he learned that the natives treated his ambassador as a local saint who had been endorsed by the founder of their religion and mentioned in their gospel. Impressing Roosevelt was Bullitt’s task in Moscow, and he initially succeeded. Demonstrating his influence and friendship with important people in the Soviet Union was a constant theme in his official dispatches; but over time their addressee, Roosevelt, grew tired of this. On the other hand, it was true that Bullitt befriended some of the most important Europeans in the twentieth century. Moreover, some of these important men and women made their careers or physically survived thanks to Bullitt’s efforts.

When Bullitt arrived in Moscow, he shared his sympathy for the socialist experiment with leftists like Lincoln Steffens and Henry Wallace. During his first months in the Soviet capital, he often spoke about the Bolsheviks with enthusiasm. He persuaded Wallace, then secretary of agriculture, to pay attention to the Soviet achievements in his field; for some reason, he emphasized their successes in artificial insemination.¹⁵ According to Wallace, Bullitt had a free and liberal mind, and he could not stand surveillance. As a result of his life in Moscow, Wallace noted, Bullitt’s attitude toward the Soviets changed radically, and he described the Communist Party as an institution similar to the Spanish Inquisition. However, Bullitt told Wallace that he was fond of the Russian people, particularly the women: even in the construction of the Moscow subway, he noted that women worked harder than men. A supporter of further rapprochement with the Soviets, Wallace worried about Bullitt’s anti-Soviet instincts; people like Bullitt brought on the Cold War, Wallace said later. He added that Bullitt was a wonderful man but given to sudden mood swings.¹⁶

Even the Soviet spies in Washington acknowledged the unusual qualities of the American ambassador. In October 1934 they managed to read Bullitt’s memos to the State Department and passed them on to Moscow. Soon Bullitt learned about the leak from his Moscow friends and reported it back to the State Department. Closing the circle, in an encrypted message to the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), Soviet agent Yitzhak Akhmerov wrote from Washington, DC: “We ask you to observe maximum caution in sending reports from B[ullitt] to offices neighboring yours. The cunning of B[ullitt], his abilities, social disposition, and contacts with high-ranking persons in your city [Moscow] give him opportunity to touch many people. An indirect hint in a conversation may be enough [for him].”¹⁷

Despite his concerns about security and secrecy, Bullitt had unusually egalitarian, even anarchic ideas about the work of an American embassy. According to one of his closest associates, Loy Henderson, Bullitt did not recognize the traditional hierarchy. The ambassador believed that prior experience in the diplomatic service was a hindrance to good service in the Moscow embassy. This informal playful atmosphere shocked some guests. Having visited the embassy shortly after it was opened, Professor Samuel Harper, a son of the president of the University of Chicago and the founding father of Russian Studies there, strongly disapproved of the “tone” he discerned in the embassy, which he described as “too frivolous and even flippant”; this tone, Harper said, was set by the embassy’s leader, whom Harper had disliked since the Paris Peace Conference.¹⁸

For a while Bullitt was delighted with the Kremlin leadership. “The men at the head of the Soviet government today are really intelligent, sophisticated, vigorous human beings.” They fully embodied these qualities in greeting the American ambassador, who was distinguished from the ordinary Western diplomats with whom the Soviet leaders could not “be persuaded to waste their time.” As Bullitt informed his president, Soviet leaders habitually ignored European ambassadors in Moscow, but they were “extremely eager to have contact with anyone who ha[d] first-rate intelligence and dimension as a human being. They were, for example, delighted by young Kennan” (65). The Soviets seem to have gone out of their way to make Bullitt happy. Litvinov organized a “superb banquet” featuring “nearly all” members of the government and resembling one of Jay Gatsby’s parties: “food and wines were of a quality that no one in America would dare to serve nowadays,” wrote Bullitt to the president; “many toasts were drunk to you and me and the United States” (64).

It was easy to talk to the English-speaking Litvinov, and Bullitt shared with him his wish that the Moscow high quarters would treat him as an insider: he would not stay in Russia, Bullitt said, if this didn’t happen. When conversation turned serious, they talked about the Japanese threat, a theme Bullitt brought up regularly. “Attack by Japan upon the Soviet Union is regarded as certain by all members of the Government and communist party with whom I talked in Moscow,” Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt in December 1933 (60). Litvinov considered the war with Japan so probable that he wanted an urgent pact with the European powers that would secure the Soviet Union’s western frontiers. He was particularly concerned about a possible anti-Soviet coalition consisting of Japan, Germany, and Poland, and he told Bullitt he knew about some “preliminary conversations” among these powers. To counter these preparations, Litvinov talked about the possibility of a coalition consisting of the Soviet Union, the United States, Japan, and China; he asked Bullitt to take part in organizing this alternative alliance.¹⁹ On December 15, Bullitt met the Soviet prime minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, who shared Litvinov’s fear of a forthcoming Japanese attack and suggested that if Soviet-American relations had been established a couple of years earlier, the Japanese threat would have been averted. Bullitt agreed with this counterfactual analysis. In late 1933 Bullitt met the Bolsheviks who were in charge of Soviet foreign relations, trade, and defense. They all agreed about the threat of war with Japan and wanted American help. Interestingly, the only high-ranking official who did not believe in the Japanese threat was Karl Radek, a shrewd and ruthless leader of the Communist International. Bullitt befriended him but did not trust his opinion.²⁰ The fear of Japan was the reason for the unexpected Soviet decision to join the League of Nations in September 1934. Even though the United States was not a member of the league, Litvinov asked Bullitt to support the decision, and Bullitt responded positively. Litvinov also asked for Bullitt’s word that America would not lend to Japan, and that France and England would not give the country credit either.

The American ambassador engaged in a friendly competition with People’s Commissar of Finance Grigory Grinko over who could learn the other’s language better. The plan was that six months after the deal was struck, in June 1934, Litvinov would judge which of the two men had achieved the greater level of linguistic proficiency. The prize would be a medal with Roosevelt’s profile, Bullitt informed the American president. Bullitt never did learn to speak Russian, and Kennan and others translated for him while he was in Moscow. It is not known whether Grinko learned English, but Bullitt liked him anyway. Three years after the agreed date, Grinko was arrested, tortured, and tried; on March 2, 1938, at the end of his trial, he confessed to being a Trotskyite and cooperating with the German, Japanese, and American intelligence services. After sharing with the judges his “joy at the fact that our villainous plot has been uncovered and those unprecedented troubles that we had prepared, are now prevented,” Grinko was executed.²¹

Always sympathetic to the military, Bullitt enjoyed the company of the People’s Commissar of Defense, Kliment Voroshilov, “one of the most charming persons I have ever met.” Voroshilov grew up in the metal factories in Luhansk and started his career in the Red Army during the Civil War in Ukraine. He would become the longest-serving member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (thirty-four years), and his native city would be named after him. Voroshilov knew how to engage with Americans: Thayer also wrote about Voroshilov as a charming fellow who looked like a “cherub,” and recorded how Bullitt danced “some sort of a medley” of the Caucasian lezginka and American foxtrot with Voroshilov.²² At their first meeting, Voroshilov asked Bullitt to bring to the embassy American naval and aviation experts so that his commissariat could use their advice. Passing this request to Roosevelt, Bullitt offered his support: “It is obvious that our representatives in the Soviet Union today can have a really immense influence.” He advised Roosevelt to send the best men, “who will be absolutely on the level with the Soviet Government”; if these American officers in Russia would “refrain from spying and dirty tricks of every variety,” they could play a role of the military advisers to the Soviet leaders, which might be “very useful in the future” (65).

On December 20, 1933, Voroshilov invited Bullitt and his translators to a gala in the Kremlin. Stalin was there, and with him “the whole gang that really runs things—the inside directorate,” explained Litvinov in his rich English. Bullitt was introduced to Stalin for the first time. “He was dressed in a common soldier’s uniform,” Bullitt observed. Surprised by the Soviet dictator’s small stature, he admired Stalin’s “shrewd humor.” In a dispatch to Roosevelt, Bullitt dedicated a long passage to a detailed account of Stalin’s pipe, eyes, hands, nostrils, and mustache. Evidently, Bullitt was taken with Stalin, and he eagerly shared his feelings with Roosevelt: “With Lenin one felt at once that he was in the presence of a great man; with Stalin I felt like talking to a wiry Gypsy with roots and emotions beyond my experience” (66).

Stalin and Bullitt spoke across the hostess, Voroshilov’s wife. The toasts at the table followed a tradition that Bullitt thought was Russian but was actually Georgian. Stalin began by proposing a toast to President Roosevelt, “who in spite of the mute growls of the Fishes dared to recognize the Soviet Union.” Hamilton Fish, a congressman and the First World War veteran, was an opponent of the New Deal and of recognition of the Soviet Union. Stalin knew it and he knew the word “fish”; the table appreciated the joke with “considerable laughter.” In response, Bullitt proposed a toast to the health of President Kalinin. Molotov offered the third toast, “To the health of one who comes to us as a new Ambassador but an old friend” (67). The memory of his unsuccessful mission to Bolshevik Russia, which had for a time ruined Bullitt’s career, was helping him now.

After the tenth toast, Bullitt tried to sip rather than drain his glass, but Litvinov explained that it would offend the gentleman who proposed the toast. Bullitt continued to drink in Russian-style, bottoms-up. “I have never before so thanked God,” Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt who also loved to serve his guests a few too many cocktails, “for the possession of a head impervious to any quantity of liquor.” Gradually, everyone at the table reached a condition that Bullitt compared to the all-male banquets at Yale, where “discretion was conspicuous by its absence.” The intoxicated Soviet leaders discussed the Japanese threat. Introducing Bullitt to General Alexander Egorov, chief of general staff, Stalin said: “This is the man who will lead our army victoriously against Japan when Japan attacks” (promoted to the highest military rank of marshal, Egorov was tried and executed in 1939). Near the end of the dinner, Stalin asked Bullitt for assistance in a massive economic deal: he wanted to buy 250,000 tons of old railroad from the United States, which the Soviets needed for a new line to Vladivostok. Stalin explained that he would beat the Japanese anyway, but used American rails would make it easier. Stalin then grabbed Georgiy Piatakov, the deputy commissar of heavy industry, marched him to the piano and ordered him to play. While the organizer of Soviet industrialization played “wild Russian dances,” Stalin stood behind him and hugged him “affectionately” (67–68). Piatakov was tried, tortured, and executed in 1937.

After hours of eating and drinking, Stalin and Bullitt sat down and talked through an interpreter. “Stalin was feeling extremely gay, as we all were, but he gave me the feeling that he was speaking honestly,” Bullitt reported to Roosevelt. Wanting Bullitt to feel at home in Moscow, Stalin asked him to tell Roosevelt that, “in spite of being a leader of a capitalist nation,” the American president was “one of the most popular people in the Soviet Union.” Passing these niceties on to Roosevelt, Bullitt added some flattery of his own for Stalin, calling the Soviet leader a man of “great shrewdness and inflexible will”; the conversation convinced him that Stalin also had “intuition in extraordinary measure.” Finally, Stalin had another gift: “the quality of being able to treat the most serious things with a joke and twinkle in his eye. Lenin had the same quality. You have it,” Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt. In these semi-official dispatches, Bullitt never missed a chance to inform, boast, entertain, and flatter; reporting on a drunken party with Stalin was a great chance to practice this diplomatic art. Saying goodbye, Stalin promised Bullitt something that he did not offer to any other ambassador or, in fact, to anyone but his bodyguards: access “any time, day or night. You have only to let me know and I will see you at once.” Bullitt saw this offer as an “extraordinary gesture” and had no doubt it was sincere and true (69). Despite his intuition, Bullitt did not suspect that he would never see the Soviet leader again.

Before leaving, Stalin asked Bullitt whether there was “anything at all in the Soviet Union” that Bullitt wanted. Bullitt replied modestly, saying that he wanted nothing but to continue “the intimate relations” with Stalin. But when Stalin persisted in offering his help “with a genuinely friendly emotion,” Bullitt revealed what he really wanted. The new embassy needed working and residential space, and Bullitt had his eye on a neoclassical mansion that was built in 1915 for Moscow banker and industrialist Nikolay Vtorov, one of the richest men in prerevolutionary Russia. The mansion was not big enough for the embassy, though its central hall was “colossal,” wrote Bullitt, who later used this hall to its limit. The mansion, which would be the ambassador’s residence, later became known by the hybrid Russian-English name “Spaso House.”

For the embassy itself, Bullitt chose a different place: Sparrow Hills, a high bluff on the bend of the Moscow River. There was a lake and wooded areas, and the best views of the river and the city. “We were not modest in our demands and asked for the entire bluff containing some fifteen acres of ground,” Bullitt wrote to Roosevelt, who approved the idea. They did not know that more than one hundred years earlier, on this plot of land Alexander I started but never finished the “Cathedral of Christ the Savior,” which would have served as a monument to Russia’s victory over Napoleon. Nor could they have foreseen that after the Soviet Union’s victory in the Second World War, Moscow State University would be built on the same land—the “temple of science,” as the Russian press called it, which belatedly imitated the skyscrapers of New York but was, at the time of its construction in 1948, the tallest building in Europe. Unaware of this, Bullitt had his own grand project in mind. He wanted to build at Sparrow Hills an expanded replica of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s manor in Virginia. “I can conceive of nothing more perfect for an American Embassy than a reproduction of Monticello in that setting,” Bullitt wrote to the president (65). For both of them, Jefferson’s estate in Virginia, a masterpiece of neoclassical architecture, was a symbol of the American Revolution, pilgrimage site, and a monument to American democracy. Several high-ranking officials in the State Department were southerners, and Bullitt hoped that they would like his idea of a Monticello on the Moscow River.

And so, Bullitt asked Stalin to give the American government fifteen acres of land in Sparrow Hills for the construction of the American embassy. Stalin agreed, and Bullitt held out his hand to shake hands with the Soviet Leader. To his astonishment, Stalin took his head in his hands and gave him “a large kiss.” Then Stalin turned up his face for kiss in return, and Bullitt kissed Stalin. “This evening with Stalin and the inner circle of the Soviet Government seems almost unbelievable in retrospect,” wrote Bullitt to Roosevelt (69).

Bullitt immediately started corresponding with Soviet authorities about building the embassy. Troyanovsky, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, confirmed the deal in an official letter. Roosevelt requested funding for the project from Congress, which allotted money with the understanding that the American government would rent Spaso House while the embassy in Sparrow Hills was under construction. Bullitt’s daughter, Anna, later described Spaso House: “It was a Russian Victorian pomposity, badly proportioned and cold, enormous with no room for anything. It was built around the central ballroom with a glass dome like the Capitol, so I crawl from my bedroom and lie on the floor upstairs and watch between the marble balustrade what was going on below, like Voroshilov and Budyonny doing Russian dances after polo.” Indeed, the residence was not entirely comfortable, and the ambassador knew about the unfortunate history of his new home: in 1918, the owner’s son killed his father, a fabulously rich industrialist, in the central ballroom. After the revolution, the commissars used the mansion for entertaining; according to Anna, they added “an enormous dining room in red marble, incorporating the hammer and sickle in the Corinthian columns” (81).

Bullitt noticed surveillance every time he left Spaso House. At home he was always concerned about wiretapping; he routinely instructed his assistants to look for taps and hidden microphones, and often they found them. He invited naval experts to set up professionally designed codes to encrypt his communications and to eliminate bugs and leaks. Ironically, years later Bullitt would find out that Tyler Kent, the person to whom he entrusted the codes, was a Soviet agent.²³

After much effort Bullitt managed to get permission from the Kremlin to fly an airplane over the Soviet Union. He even planned to fly to Siberia, though this ambitious project did not materialize. He had a personal pilot, Thomas White, who had been recommended by General MacArthur. White was tall, elegant, and spoke Russian, but he did not fly well. Once he lost his control of his plane and landed upside down in a swamp near Leningrad while flying with Bullitt, though both survived the accident. But like other Bullitt’s employees, White made a stellar career during the Cold War: from 1957 to 1961, he served as Chief of Staff of the US Air Force and in this capacity, convinced conservative generals to produce the first ballistic missiles. Another smart appointment was Roscoe Hillencoetter, a sailor and naval courier whom Bullitt named his security chief. Hillencoetter followed Bullitt to Paris and served as assistant naval attaché. Later he worked with the French Resistance, and after the war became the first director of the CIA.

Bullitt’s initial successes evoked a mixed response from the diplomats who had more extensive experience with the Soviets. The British consul in Leningrad wrote, “The new ambassador, Bullitt, was appointed by Roosevelt as being a friend of the Soviet Union—a dangerous position to be in. The other foreign missions are watching with Schadenfreude to see how long the honeymoon will last.”²⁴ George Kennan also mixed warmth with caution when talking about Bullitt. He was “a fine ambassador,” Kennan wrote in 1972. “We took pride in him and never had an occasion to be ashamed of him. . . . Bullitt, as I knew him at that time in Moscow, was charming, well-educated, imaginative, a man of the world.” Kennan emphasized that Bullitt was able to argue with the great intellects of the Communist movement, such as Radek and Bukharin. He spoke excellent French and German, which compensated for his inability to speak Russian. Most importantly, “he was outstandingly a buoyant disposition. He resolutely refused to permit the life around him to degenerate into dullness and dreariness. All of us who lived in his entourage were the beneficiaries of this blitheness of spirit, this insistence that life be at all times animated and interesting and moving ahead.”²⁵

However, Bullitt was impatient, which was a weakness for a diplomat, Kennan argued. The ambassador “came to Russia with high hopes, and he wanted to see them realized at once.” Kennan also believed that Bullitt had underestimated the difference between Stalin and Lenin, and this misperception was the reason for his excessive disenchantment with the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, Bullitt and his staff still accomplished a great deal. “We were in many respects a pioneer enterprise—a wholly new type of American diplomatic mission, the model and precursor of great many missions of a later day. . . . We were the first to cope seriously, for example, with the problem of security . . . in a hostile environment. But we were also the first to take a primarily intellectual and scholarly attitude to our work. . . . We regarded ourselves as a lonely and exposed bastion of American governmental life, surrounded by a veritable ocean of official Soviet ill will.”²⁶

Although this description of the ambassadorial lifestyle does not sound very appealing, Kennan remembered his years in the Soviet Union as the best, most productive time in his long life. Even the Moscow winters were “healthy and exhilarating.” He was lonely at first, especially in the winter of 1934, when Bullitt left for Washington and made Kennan the acting head of the embassy. Unlike his colleagues, who were mostly bachelors, Kennan was married but kept his wife away from Moscow. Like Wilson, Kennan was raised a Presbyterian; like Freud, he claimed he was agnostic. The problems of moral choice tormented Kennan, and like Bullitt, he often discussed them in theological and demonological terms. Before his appointment to Moscow, Kennan had served as an intern at the diplomatic station in Riga. He practiced his Russian with Vladimir Kozhevnikov, a homosexual and a cocaine addict. Embarrassed, Kennan wrote to his sister, “My Puritan origins [are] rising in relentless revolt against the non-puritanical influences of the last few years,” and the victory was with the former. As he put it, “prolonged and intimate association with the devil does not lie in the Kennan character.” That summer he fell in love and, a few months later, married a woman who would remain his wife for seventy-three years. Referring to Faust, young Kennan wrote that his biography should be called “The story of the man who tried to sell his soul and could not” (in fact, his biography, written by John Gaddis, is subtitled An American Life).²⁷ As a connoisseur of Russian literature and theater, Kennan was able “to drink in impressions of Russia itself: of its life, its culture, its aspect, its smell.” He socialized with American journalists who were based in Moscow, such as Walter Duranty and Eugene Lyons. Most of them sympathized with the regime, enjoyed its support, and lived with Russian girlfriends. Together they organized, as Kennan put it, “uproariously informal parties.”

Sharing abundant drinks and meals with their Russian friends, the American diplomats and journalists passionately discussed the absurdities of both Russian and American life. But Kennan knew he was different from other Americans in Moscow: he was never enchanted with Marxism and avoided the sharp disappointment with it that became familiar to many, including Bullitt. For Kennan, there was something in Russia for which he could not find words, and he was in love with these inexpressible qualities: “words would fail me if I were to try to convey in this context the excitement, the enjoyment, the fascination, and the frustration of the initial service in Moscow.”²⁸ This was a remarkable confession for someone who built an outstanding career on his ability to shape vague political ideas into precise diplomatic formulae. He believed that his colleagues also felt an unusual satisfaction with their Russian life: “Most of us look back at these days, I suppose, as the high point of life—the high point, at least, in comradeship, in gaiety, in intensity of experience.”²⁹

Still, the Moscow entries in Kennan’s diary are full of uncomfortable experiences that he tried to control. On September 3, 1934, Kennan wrote that in Moscow “human flesh lives in one seething, intimate mass—far more so even than in New York. . . . And it is human life in the raw, human life brought down to its fundamentals—good and evil, drunk and sober, loving and quarreling, laughing and weeping—all that human life is and does anywhere, but all much more simple and direct, and therefore stronger.”³⁰ Discussing the frequent question, “How do the Russians stand it?” he responded: “Many of them didn’t.” All those vital people he saw on the streets, “they are the elite, not the elite of wealth . . . but nature’s own elite, the elite of the living, as opposed to hoi polloi of the dead.”³¹ This survivors’ elite captivated him, “an over-civilized, neurotic foreigner” who would have difficulty enduring there, he wrote, even for a few months. Bitterly critical of the Soviet regime, Kennan loved “the tremendous, pulsating warmth and vitality of the Russians.” This was also Bullitt’s perspective, though young Kennan articulated it better—and exaggerated to an extent. They both would remain “distrusted outsider[s]” of Soviet life, which they explored with undiplomatic vigor and disdain; but a deep, illusionary sense of belonging was solely Kennan’s: “I would rather be sent to Siberia among them (which is certainly what would happen to me without delay if I were a Soviet citizen) than to live on Park Avenue among our stuffy folk.” Here were unusual views for someone who would lay the foundations of American politics toward the Soviet Union for decades to come. Deeply concerned about escalating problems in the Soviet Union, he never blamed the people—this “human life in the raw,” the surviving “elite of the living,” “one of the world’s greatest people.” Only the government was responsible for the terror, devastation, and despair—a “ruthless authoritarian regime which will stop at nothing.”³²

This uneasy mix between two deep emotions—love for the Russian people and culture and deep contempt toward the Soviet regime—infused Kennan’s reports, articles, and books, including the famous “Long Telegram.” Balancing one another, these two feelings secured the flexibility of Kennan’s strategy of containment, which did help the world avoid a new world war. Kennan’s friends knew that his love for Russia was unconditional; Isaiah Berlin described this passion as “a kind of unhappy love affair, where love grows deeper and more desperate the more obviously it is unrequited.”³³ They also knew about Kennan’s critical attitude toward the US government; after reading his Soviet-American Relations, Berlin remarked: “How typical of George Kennan to accuse America of all recent misdeeds.”³⁴

Kennan’s service at the Bullitt embassy in Moscow fundamentally shaped his political views. In his dispatches from there, he focused mainly on the arrests, deportations, and sheer terror of Soviet life; for him, it was “a sort of liberal education in the horrors of Stalinism.” When he wrote his memoirs many decades later, he said that his understanding of the events in the mid-1930s had not been “inaccurate.”³⁵ His dislike for Soviet-style Marxism made him a particularly shrewd observer: “My own case was perhaps unusual in that there were no pro-Soviet sympathies to overcome.” Unlike his fellow Americans in Moscow, he had never gone through a Marxist period; moreover, he harbored a complete distaste for Russian Marxism. He explained this distaste as a result of his experience living in the Baltic countries; his happy marriage to a Norwegian helped as well. As he saw it, after Kirov’s murder in 1934 a “terrible cloud of suspicion and violence, of sinister, unidentifiable terror” came over the USSR, and it was a new thing rather than a continuation of a tradition. In Washington, the New Dealers believed in the virtues of planned economy and were not particularly interested in his depictions of the Soviet terror; Kennan soon realized that his views of Stalin’s Russia did not match the official line in Washington. However, Bullitt saw in Kennan his most capable employee and fully supported him.

The regime invested its power in isolating the foreigners who lived in Moscow from its native population. Still, opportunities for contact were many: according to Kennan, the members of the embassy talked with ordinary Russians at the theater, during public events, and while traveling. Focused on the political terror, investigative torture, and mass arrests that he had seen in Moscow, Kennan did not think that they were logical consequences of socialism. On the contrary, his views in this period were shifting to the left, and he was becoming more critical of American capitalism, even in the relatively watered-down version articulated in the New Deal.

Despite Moscow’s charms, Kennan developed ulcers that everyone agreed were the result of the bad food and hard life in Russia. In his memoirs Kennan connects the worsening of his ulcer to the murder of Kirov, which, he thought, initiated the Soviet terror. Bullitt sent him to Vienna, and his condition improved under the supervision of the pioneering doctor Frieda Por, a Jewish Hungarian therapist who suggested he read Freud.³⁶ As Bullitt did for Freud, Kennan helped his doctor emigrate to the United States. Upon his return to Moscow in 1935, Kennan watched the show trials and purges for two more years. He reported them to Washington in great detail. “Now we know more about the background of these events than we did then; but then, on the spot, our ideas were quite adequate,” he wrote in 1972. In the Russia of the mid-1930s, Kennan saw “the purges, cynicism, shamelessness, contempt for humanity—all triumphantly enthroned.” The country was in the hands of a monstrous tyrant, he wrote, and the evidence of human degradation was everywhere. “The effect was never to leave me. Its imprint on my political judgment was one that would place me at odds with official thinking in Washington for at least a decade thereafter.”³⁷

Kennan’s extraordinarily successful career during the Cold War was a result of his early experiences in Moscow and with Bullitt. “I couldn’t be the sort of smooth, self-contained type of Foreign Service officer who advanced because he’d made no waves,” Kennan wrote. In February 1946, Isaiah Berlin wrote that he was surprised to find in Kennan a very unusual kind of diplomat. Unlike many colleagues whom Berlin met in Washington during his diplomatic service in the Second World War, Kennan was thoughtful and gloomy; Berlin explained Kennan’s “melancholy” by the fact that he was intellectually “absorbed” by the nature of the Stalinist regime.³⁸

But in early 1934, Bullitt and Kennan still hoped that the difficulties of socialism would be temporary and the honeymoon of Soviet-American relations would produce serious results that would change Russia and the world. That spring, Bullitt brought a new group of employees to Moscow. His new secretary, Carmel Offie, was known as a very capable man (Kennan described him as a “Renaissance type”), but he did not speak Russian. For many years, he took care of Bullitt’s correspondence, financial affairs, and health issues. Loy Henderson was Kennan’s friend at the Riga consulate; after his work in the Moscow embassy, he became an influential desk officer at the State Department. The pinnacle of his career was to predict the 1939 pact between the Soviets and the Nazis. But later during the war, the State Department purged the officials whose expertise sounded too anti-Soviet, and almost all of these people were former members of Bullitt’s embassy. Roosevelt sent Henderson to Asia, and he served as the ambassador to Iraq, India, and Iran.

Another expert on the Soviet Union, whose career Bullitt launched to the top of American politics, was Charles Bohlen. He had also learned Russian in Riga with Kennan and then became Bullitt’s close associate in Moscow. More diplomatic than other members of the embassy, Bohlen survived several changes in American policy towards the Soviet Union. During the war, he came to Moscow with Harry Hopkins, and was Roosevelt’s translator in Tehran and Yalta. Later he wrote the most important speeches for Marshall and was Truman’s adviser on Soviet affairs. Isaiah Berlin knew both diplomats, Bohlen and Kennan, and noted interesting differences between them. To Bohlen, Soviet-American relations were something like a game of chess; for Kennan, it was a struggle of “ideas, traditions . . . forms of life.”³⁹ In 1953 Bohlen replaced Kennan, whom the Soviets had declared persona non grata, as the head of the US embassy in Moscow. Then, like Bullitt, Bohlen was appointed ambassador to France in 1963.

Two of the top diplomats of the Cold War, Bohlen and Kennan were close friends. “Life has made us the intellectual and professional brothers,” wrote Kennan. Depicting his friendship with Bohlen but, as usual, lacking English words to describe all things related to Russia, Kennan cited Nikolai Bukharin, an early Bolshevik leader and a victim of the Moscow show trials (1936–1938). Kennan admired Bukharin and his friends and was shocked by the trials. Tortured and possibly drugged, the erstwhile leaders of the revolution confessed to espionage and high treason and denounced their friends in incredible detail. According to Kennan, Bukharin said in his last speech before being convicted and shot, “intellectual friendship was the strongest of the bonds between men.”⁴⁰

In this rhetorical construction, Kennan described a friendship with an American colleague using the words that one Bolshevik said about another in the most extraordinary circumstances, after torture and before death. The American observers saw the people who made the Russian Revolution and became its victims as fabulous figures, heroes of ancient tragedy, hostages of fate. Those few Muscovites who met the Americans in Stalin’s Moscow also saw them as mythical heroes—powerful aliens who could bring either danger or salvation. This trade in extraordinary and unrealistic expectations was one of the secrets of Stalin’s Moscow.