George F. Kennan and the Trauma of the Soviet Purge Trials

Three decades after Stalin’s late-1930s show trials of Soviet officials, the U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan still felt the “heartrending” “hammer-blow impressions” of these horrors. The “imprint” of the purges on “my political judgment” had proven lasting, he concluded. Kennan was affected so deeply because the purges destroyed not only many Soviet officials whom he admired or had even befriended, but also his aspiration to shepherd a cultural exchange between Russia and America. Riveted by the melodrama of the staged trials, Kennan attended the proceedings by day (whispering a translation into the ear of the U.S. ambassador) and worked into the night translating the transcripts. Despite his repugnance at the cruelty, Kennan also concluded that some of the purge victims had indeed opposed Stalin’s regime – though the charges of “terrorism” were grotesquely exaggerated. That nuanced view of the purges fits the current historiography.

Because the purges had nearly shut down contact with Soviet citizens and officials, the U.S. State Department downgraded the importance of the detailed translation and reporting work at which Kennan prided himself. That humiliation and setback to his professional advancement came on top of what Kennan bitterly termed the Roosevelt administration’s own “purge” – folding into the State Department’s Division of European Affairs the hitherto independent Eastern European Division, a bureaucratic and intellectual refuge for specialists like Kennan.

My paper tracks the irregular success of Kennan’s efforts to contain his resentment of Moscow and Washington officials at the time of the purges and afterward. In hashing and re-hashing his traumatic experience of the purges, Kennan, displaying evident emotional pain, gradually re-constructed these memories so as to replace his originally nuanced judgment with a Manichaean perspective that held the victims as totally innocent and Stalin as totally evil.