Did Kennan Foresee Putin?

In “America and the Russian Future,” his 1951 article in Foreign Affairs, the U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan plumbed the psychological forces that shaped the Soviet system. “No ruling group likes to admit that it can govern its people only by regarding and treating them as criminals,” he wrote. “For this reason there is always a tendency to justify internal oppression by pointing to the menacing iniquity of the outside world.”

This was an astute view of the Soviet regime during the final years of Stalin’s dictatorship, but it equally captures late Putinism today. As Kennan continued, “The outside world must be portrayed, in these circumstances, as very iniquitous indeed—iniquitous to the point of the caricature.” Thanks to the efforts of Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergei Naryshkin, and other “comrades,” the Putin regime has created an image of a West that is not only hell-bent on destroying Russia but also a hotbed of LGBTQ orgies and a violator of traditional values—which, until recently, the average Russian did not even think about at all.

Indeed, under Putin, the Kremlin has relentlessly used the outside world to justify the repression of its own population: every Friday, the Ministry of Justice designates a certain number of people and organizations “foreign agents,” its version of what, in Stalinist terminology, were called “enemies of the people”; and the prosecutor’s office identifies “undesirable organizations”—entities that according to the authorities are agents of Western values and thus threatening to the Russian people. A new high school textbook on twentieth-century and twenty-first-century history, and a new university textbook titled Fundamentals of Russian Statehood—an attempt to systematize the ideology of Putinism—portray the West as an eternal historic enemy.

But Putin has also taken the strategy described by Kennan further, using alleged Western iniquity to justify a full-blown war. In the regime’s distorted worldview, there is no difference between the Hitlerites who attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 and the imaginary “Nazis” in Ukraine, who are supposedly mere tools of the Western powers in their efforts to destroy Russia. The arguments that should naturally come to mind—why the West would want to destroy Russia when it has built factories there, contributed to a thriving economy, made huge investments, exported goods there ranging from building materials to medicines, and opened Russia to the world—don’t work for the indoctrinated part of the population.

What would Kennan have made of Putin’s special military operation? Would he have foreseen such a war? Whatever Kennan might have thought about the current regime in ideological and historical terms, his analysis of Russia is as relevant today as it ever was and is well worth consulting to understand, to paraphrase Kennan, the sources of Putin’s conduct.

THE DEVIL YOU KNOW

To fathom how Kennan might have assessed Putin, it is important first to note that Kennan’s image as the architect of containment and therefore of the Cold War is not entirely accurate. In fact, he carefully differentiated between the Soviet people and their rulers, and he could clearly identify the origins of Soviet hostility toward the West, as he made clear in his famous “Long Telegram” sent from Moscow back to Washington in February 1946. As the political scientist and former State Department official Strobe Talbott wrote in The Russia Hand, Kennan’s “concept of containment was not meant to consign Russia and the West to endless stalemate; it was to give the Russians time to get over being Soviets.” Kennan’s model of containment was cautious and pragmatic; his approach was also reflected in other major debates in which he participated.

In 1944, according to another Talbott book, The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace, Kennan met Nitze, the future defense expert and Cold War strategist, by chance on a train while back in the United States. In that first encounter, these two men who would have such a significant influence on the course of U.S. foreign policy were in broad agreement about the future: once the war was over, there could be no allied relationship with Stalin; to the contrary, the Western world would find that the Soviet Union was its greatest enemy.

In the following years, however, their thinking diverged: Nitze believed essentially that the United States needed to increase its military might to match that of the Soviet Union. Kennan, on the other hand, insisted that the only way to avoid catastrophe was for the two superpowers to agree on arms control measures. Kennan’s view was not widely shared at the time. Dean Acheson, who became secretary of state in 1949, was on Nitze’s side: “How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm ‘by example’?”

Kennan’s image as the architect of containment is not entirely accurate.

But Kennan stuck to his faith in Soviet restraint, even in the late Stalin years. He did not believe that the Soviet tyrant would start a war and considered the division of Europe into Atlantic and Stalinist spheres of influence after World War II inevitable. As the journalist David Halberstam wrote in The Best and the Brightest, Kennan believed that national security officials “exaggerated Soviet intentions in Western Europe, and NATO’s role in stopping them.”

Indeed, ignoring Kennan’s arguments cost the United States dearly in Vietnam, another episode that helps illustrate his position. In 1950, Kennan wrote a memorandum to Acheson arguing that nothing good would come of U.S. involvement in Indochina. As Kennan saw it, the threat to the U.S.-Soviet balance of power if the communists came to power in Vietnam was exaggerated, and communism was in any case nothing but a screen: far more important and influential were the nationalist forces that were gaining strength in that country. “Many of these forces were simply outside our control, and by trying to control them we could not affect them but might, in fact, turn them against us,” Kennan argued.

In his memorandum to Acheson, he wrote, “We are getting ourselves into a position of guaranteeing the French in an undertaking which neither they nor we, nor both of us together, can win.” But his warning was ignored, and as the United States became increasingly entangled in Indochina during the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, eventually replacing the French in the futile war in Vietnam, that is exactly what happened.

Kennan was consistent in his analysis. In a 1963 interview with Look magazine, he said: “We should be prepared to talk to the devil himself, if he controls enough of the world to make it worth our while.” In 1978, he told The New York Times Magazine: “I don’t think that war is the way the Russians would like to expand their power.” Here, however, Kennan evidently meant a direct clash between the two superpowers, since the Soviets, as he knew, were prepared to use force to preserve and expand their zone of influence—applying the logic of “how not to lose” this or that territory—and soon after started a proxy war with the West in Afghanistan. (It is worth noting that the U.S. National Security Council reasoned the same way in 1955, according to the Pentagon Papers, invoking the threat of the “loss of Indochina to Communism.”)

THE WEST AGAINST ITSELF

Kennan’s analysis of Russia continued even after the Cold War, extending all the way to the talks in the 1990s between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin over NATO expansion. Clinton was maneuvering between, on the one hand, the desire of the former Soviet satellites to have reliable anchors in the West in case Russia ever returned to a dictatorship and, on the other, the fears of the ruling elite in Moscow—especially the reformers around Yeltsin—that NATO’s advance to the east would spark anti-Western sentiment in Russia and torpedo Yeltsin’s reputation at home.

According to Talbott, who was deputy secretary of state at the time, in 1997, Anatoly Chubais—then the head of Yeltsin’s presidential administration—protested that NATO expansion was “an affront to Russian security interests, a vote of no confidence in Russian reform, a millstone around the neck of the Yeltsin administration and incompatible with the very idea of partnership.”

That February, Kennan—now aged 92—waded into the debate with a New York Times article titled “A Fateful Error.” His arguments (about which he had warned Talbott in advance) echoed those of the Yeltsin team. As Kennan wrote, “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” He continued,  “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

Kennan had captured the fears of Russian liberals almost exactly. Consider the words of Yegor Gaidar, the architect of Russia’s market reforms, who could hardly be accused of anti-Western sentiment. In April 1999, on his return from a European tour that had included Serbia, Gaidar argued that the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia was “inflaming anti-American sentiment in Russia”; that it “strengthened” the hand of “radical nationalists”; and that it was “objectively pushing Russia toward isolationism, xenophobia, a new Cold War.”

It is hard to say who was right in that debate and whether there really is a logical link between the actions of the West in the late 1990s and the devastating war that Putin subsequently unleashed in Ukraine. Putin, of course, has sought to blame the war on the unjustified expansion of NATO, among other things. But Kennan and Gaidar were correct in diagnosing that from the end of the 1990s, anti-Western sentiment in Russia had become palpable, even under Yeltsin.

The larger question is whether Kennan’s arguments are relevant to the present day. Of course, at the time Kennan was writing, Yeltsin was in charge, not Putin, and those are two very different figures. Kennan also assumed that a tyrant could at least be expected to behave rationally, whereas rationality has often been lacking in the man in the Kremlin today. Indeed, it is unlikely that Kennan could ever have anticipated what would happen on February 24, 2022. His logic was based on the assumption that Russia would be governed by a man who still preserved a restrained and pragmatic vision of the global system and events—that is, someone like Putin before his 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he openly outlined for the first time, before an astonished audience of senior Western officials, his program for breaking Russia from the West.

But Kennan’s 1997 New York Times column also foresaw the possibility that events could take a problematic turn. And he noted that as a result of NATO expansion, the Russians “would see their prestige (always uppermost in the Russian mind) and their security interests as adversely affected.” In hindsight, it appears that Kennan overstated the importance of the NATO problem for ordinary Russians, but it was certainly one of the main preoccupations of the elites who came to power in Moscow three years later.

AFTER THE DUEL

Much of Kennan’s political philosophy is summed up in his two great Foreign Affairs articles, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published in 1947, and “America and the Russian Future,” which followed four years later. Both retain explanatory value for Putin’s actions and for his faux historical ideology. But perhaps the best summary of Kennan’s conclusions about Russia—the ideas that were first outlined in his Long Telegram and later refined in the two articles—comes from a short work Kennan published a decade later, in 1960, titled Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1941.

In this book, Kennan wrote of “self-created” problems linked to the essence of the Soviet regime, whose dominant motive was to preserve power: “its ideological preconceptions against the West; its cruelties at home; the traditionally Russian sense of suspicion and insecurity vis-à-vis the outside world;” and “above all its cultivation for domestic-political purposes of the myth of a hostile external environment.” All these elements are present in Putin’s policies.

Kennan captured the fears of Russian liberals almost exactly.

Kennan goes on to describe the guiding logic of Russian autocrats in words that are as true today as when they were written more than 60 years ago. “To justify the dictatorship without which they felt unable to maintain themselves in power at home,” he wrote, “they never hesitated to depict the outside world as more inimical and menacing than it actually was, and to treat it accordingly.”

In “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Kennan observed that “the Soviet leaders, taking advantage of the contributions of modern technique to the arts of despotism, have solved the question of obedience.” This had allowed them to sustain hostile external actions without limit, such that “Russians look forward to a duel of infinite duration.” It was also in this article that Kennan arrived at the best-known sentence not only in U.S. foreign policy but in all foreign policy, when he wrote that “the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”

What may be more important, however, is that in “America and the Russian Future,” Kennan also looks ahead to a future Russia after containment. He reminds us that “totalitarianism is not a national phenomenon,” that any country can succumb to it, and that “there will always be areas in which the totalitarian government will succeed in identifying itself with popular feelings and aspirations.” He stresses that “the greatness of the Russian people” must not be forgotten and that Western readers should see “the tragedy of Russia as partly our own tragedy and the people of Russia as our comrades in the long hard battle for a happier system of man’s coexistence.”

RUSSIA AND THE AMERICAN FUTURE

Writing in 1951, Kennan looked forward to “a Russian government which, in contrast to the one we know today, would be tolerant, communicative and forthright in its relations with other states and peoples.” He would live to see a government that effectively took shape under both President Mikhail Gorbachev and Yeltsin, so it can hardly be said that democracy had never gotten started in Russia. The country had traveled some way along a difficult, dramatic path full of head-on collisions and painful compromises. But then around the time of Kennan’s death in 2005, it began to return to a totalitarian model.

Kennan understood that the Western model of democracy needed to be appealing to the rest of the world. Already in 1946, he wrote at the end of his Long Telegram that “we must formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of [the] sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in [the] past.” He also warned that “the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”

In the early 1990s, Western-style democracy still served as a kind of future ideal for many Russians. Starting around 1994, however, Russians began to show rising preferences for paternalistic structures—low but stable salaries maintained by the state, say, or abstract notions of “stability.” And by 1996, polling by the Levada Center showed that 39 percent of Russians preferred the old Soviet model, as opposed to just 28 percent who opted for a democratic alternative. The gap has only widened since.

In the most recent survey on the topic, carried out by the Levada Center just a few months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, half of respondents preferred the Soviet political model, and more than 60 percent preferred the Soviet planned economy. But if Russians had become disillusioned with the liberal-democratic politics of the West, the Putin variant no longer seemed appealing either: both models were chosen by less than 20 percent of respondents. Instead, Russians began to look for an ideal in their own past, and far fewer saw themselves as part of Europe. (The portion of the population agreeing with the statement “Russia is not a European country” rose from just 36 percent in 2008 to 64 percent in 2021.)

On February 24, 2022, in a sweep of the hand, Putin took every possible alternative model for Russia off the table. But he also began to look for a bright future in a dark past, rhapsodizing on Russia’s lost historical greatness and contrasting it with the West. Since then, ordinary Russians—those who fled the country, those who have been mobilized, those who have found excuses for the war, and those who are putting up resistance to Putin from within the country—have mostly simply been trying to survive. One day, they will have to start the long process of ridding their country of totalitarianism for a second time. Not everyone in the West shares Kennan’s position that totalitarianism in Russia is also “our own tragedy.” Perhaps he was mistaken on some points, but in that respect, he was almost certainly correct.