RUSSIA: Report from Moscow

From a seven-story building across from the Kremlin, currently the office of the American who probably knows most about the mind and mood of Communist Russia, came a report last week that set off uneasy stirrings in Washington. Six weeks after his return to Moscow for the first time in six years, U.S. Ambassador George Kennan was disturbed by Russia’s change of temper, and the violence of its current hate-America campaign. He first sent home his alarms, and then this week flew from Moscow to London to discuss them with Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

The hate-America campaign is on a vaster scale than the phony postwar “peace” drive. It blankets the press and saturates the air. More significantly, the Russians are determined enough about it to cut into industrial and farm production, gathering Soviet workers into frequent mass meetings to hear denunciations of America.

Beyond its shrillness, the propaganda drive differs in two ways from the kind George Kennan became accustomed to in his two previous stints in the U.S. embassy at Moscow: 1) no longer do the Russians limit their attack to U.S. leaders, military men and “Wall Street imperialists,” while professing to accept the U.S. people as misled, peace-loving friends; now Americans in general are depicted as beasts and cannibals; 2) previously the Russians learned most of their anti-American blasts outside of Russia, to stir up distrust and dissension; now the campaign, which began back in January 1951, is primarily beamed at the Russians themselves.

Time to Reexamine. Kennan recommended to Washington that the U.S. re-examine its assumptions about Russian intentions. The assumptions to be re-examined are Kennan’s own, for it is his analysis of Russia which for the past five years has formed the heart of U.S. policy. Containment is Kennan’s catchword. As “Mr. X” writing in Foreign Affairs in 1947, he argued that Russia would not risk war to attain its expansionist objectives, that it could be checked by cool-headed applications of U.S. strength at points around the perimeter, and that ultimately the “seeds of decay” inherent in the Soviet dictatorship would destroy its threat to the democratic world.

In theory this kind of analysis called for a cool foreign policy; in practice it encouraged a complacent one. It seemed to say that time was on the side of the U.S. and its allies. Last week George Kennan was feeling not a bit complacent. Some hate-Americanisms in the Soviet press during Kennan’s first six weeks:

¶ From Bolshevik, theoretical organ of the Soviet Communist Party:”The American usurpers, today’s cannibals, are wearing uniforms of the American army.”

¶ From Soviet State and Law: “Truman’s America hastens to repeat Hitler’s Germany . . . The U.S.A. is now in a state of war hysteria.”

¶ From Pravda: “All peace-aspiring nations are deeply indignant over the monstrous atrocities of the U.S. soldiery . . .”

¶ Another: “Dachau was a death camp. Koje is a whole island of death run by American hangmen.”

It remained for Party Philosopher G. Aleksandrov to cap it all in a big article in Pravda. “Cannibalistic American imperialism,” wrote he, has a master plan in the works for eliminating 700 million people in Europe and Asia with a calculated program of war, starvation and disease.* The Americans now consider themselves a “master race,” with a mission to rid the world of “inferior” people. “Let all people of good will in all countries of the world know these facts,” wrote Aleksandrov. “Let them remember that in the person of the American imperialists and their supporters there are the bloodiest beasts, the worst enemies of humanity.”

Like Old Times. To the outside world, the campaign was uncomfortably reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s home-front campaign against the Poles in the days before his Wehrmacht started World War II and as venomous as anything Soviet Russia hurled at Nazi Germany during the war. It was the kind of technique a dictatorship must use to put an oppressed population in a mood to fight a war. Yet neither Kennan nor the Russian Desk analysts in the State Department are ready to push their conclusions that far. For one thing, they doubt that 72-year-old Joseph Stalin, a man who believes that patience and the inner weakness of capitalism are on his side, is now willing to begin a world war which would jeopardize the empire he has created in 30 bloody years. In the satellite countries, the Kremlin is currently troubled not only by sullen populaces, but by unsatisfactory puppets. Finally, except for routine sea-air maneuvers in the Eastern Baltic and some spring exercises in East Germany, there have been no reports of major Soviet military moves.

But despite these reassuring notes, the fact remains that the Kremlin leaders are not whipping their 200 million subjects into a hate-America frenzy simply for the perverse fun of it.

* Five years ago cannibal-conscious Aleksandrov was severely chastised and almost purged for preaching “a toothless vegetarianism” against highbrow critics of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist thinking.