Word: kennan
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...American military mission to help Trotsky in the formation of the new Red army on the ground that such an army could "by proper methods be taken from Bolshevik control and used against Germans, and even [against] its creators." Nevertheless, since official Washington offered scant guidance. Historian Kennan gives Francis high marks for showing as much "fidelity, persistence, courage...
...President Wilson was in an idealistic swivet. In Kennan's view, he cherished an "image of the Russians as a simple people, clothed in a peculiar virtue compiled of poverty, helplessness, and remoteness from worldly success-a mass of mute, suppressed idealists languishing beneath the boot of the German captor." The real boot, of course, was the Soviet reign of terror; Lenin and Trotsky, between hasty Kremlin lunches "of salt pork, buckwheat grits, and red caviar," were stamping out all political opposition. Wilson might never have heeded Anglo-French pleas for intervention had it not been for "sentimental" considerations...
...third volume, Historian Kennan reserves the melancholy story of "the fate of these young Americans" engaged in "a foreign civil war in the endless swamps and forests of the Russian Arctic...
...Little, Too Late. Despite Kennan's strenuous objectivity, one inescapable conclusion leaps from the pages of his book-taken rapidly and resolutely, the decision to intervene would have snapped Bolshevik power like a twig. More than a score of separate Russian governments were contesting Lenin's right to rule on Russian soil. The Russian people were famine-ridden and war-weary. Lenin himself relied on endless improvisation. If this was one of history's great lost opportunities, the chief culprit was Wood-row Wilson. Democrat Kennan admits: "[Wilson] drew onto himself, ultimately, the blame for the failure...
...Author Kennan's own thinking about Russia has not advanced as far as might be expected beyond Wilson's. This is demonstrated in Kennan's BBC lectures about the need for "disengagement" (TIME, Dec. 23), now published in book form as Russia, the Atom and the West...