While it became apparent that there were anti-Soviet elements within the uprising , there is no evidence Stalin or the leadership of the Red Army did not make every realistic effort to try to take Warsaw as soon as possible, as some have tried to assert. After the Germans reinforced their positions in Poland, it became much more difficult for the Soviets to capture Warsaw as quickly as they had originally anticipated. According to Roberts:
"The uprising did reinforce Stalin's inclination to capture the city; the problem was that he was unable to do so. Stalin could, of course, have ordered the Red Army to concentrate all its available strength on the capture of Warsaw. Even so, it is doubtful that the city would have fallen very quickly given the time it would have taken to redeploy forces from other fronts and such action would have jeopardized other operational goals that were considered by Moscow as important as storming Warsaw."
Just prior to the Warsaw Uprising, Kennan wrote a long essay intended for Harriman in which he acknowledged that with the coming defeat of Germany, the Soviet Union would - for better or worse - occupy the most significant place in Europe. In this essay, "Russia - Seven Years Later", Kennan stated that there was no stable basis for understanding reality in the Soviet Union and few Americans would ever understand this mystery. This underscores the main problem with Kennan and his analyses of the time. He implies here that he is one of a very few or perhaps even the only one smart enough to discern the ugly puzzle that is the Soviet Union. Kennan, not necessarily through any fault of his own, had limitations on his access to the Soviet government and Stalin's thinking. He also lacked access to information that would later become available to historians, not only about Stalin's thinking but about those in his own government. It is therefore inevitable that Kennan's analyses and conclusions would likewise suffer from these limitations. These limitations can be forgiven, but he never seems to acknowledge his necessarily restricted perspective. Instead he is cocksure in his proclamations, lacking the humility to offer caveats that may have been in order and to prevent his proclamations from being used by militant cold war ideologues - something which he later complained of when attempting to clarify that his containment policy was meant to focus on the political and diplomatic rather than the military.
How Kennan's Views Dovetailed with Washington's New Foreign Policy Consensus
Within weeks of Kennan's telegram, Winston Churchill gave his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Missouri. Though Churchill acknowledged the bravery and sacrifice of the Soviet people, a particular passage in the speech, in which Churchill speaks of an iron curtain behind which the states of Eastern Europe were not just subject to being in the Soviet sphere of influence but were being increasingly subject to Soviet dictatorial control, captured everyone's attention. Furthermore, Churchill spoke of growing concerns about communist influence in Western Europe and Soviet tensions at the time with Iran and Turkey. He also invoked the specter of Hitler in connection with not allowing a Soviet Union that admired force and disdained weakness to expand indefinitely.
A year later, President Truman gave a speech in which he introduced what would become known as the Truman Doctrine. In the speech, Truman stated that every nation in the world had to choose between alternative ways of organizing society - one based on freedom and elected representative government and the other based on repression and rule by a minority. Consequently, it was the responsibility of the U.S. to support "free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." He requested aid for the Greek government in its battle with a communist insurgency and for Turkey which was confronted by Soviet claims in the Turkish Straits.
At this point hardliners in both the U.S. and Britain had determined that the Soviets were pursuing their interests "unilaterally" without consideration for the interests of the western powers.
However, as WWII drew to a close, Stalin had remained hopeful of maintaining the "Grand Alliance" with the U.S. and Britain, though he was aware of the possibility that the western powers might eventually make an accommodation with Germany against the Soviets. In addition to securing a defensive buffer or "sphere of influence" on the Soviet western border, Stalin's main foreign policy objective was preventing the re-emergence of Germany as a military power - which he believed could occur within a generation unless it was specifically prevented from doing so. He also initially showed more openness to what he termed "New Democracy" for the Eastern European states.
New Democracy was an acknowledgment that a dictatorship of the proletariat was not the only way toward socialism. Instead the Eastern European countries could evolve toward socialism over the long term. Stalin believed this was a very real possibility in light of all that he was able to achieve in terms of the Soviet Union's industrial and social development within the decade before the war. A peaceful Europe would be needed to facilitate this. Consequently, Stalin advised the Bulgarian Communist Party in September of 1946 to form the equivalent of a Labor Party comprised of workers and other members of the lower classes. He told representatives of the Czech and Polish left much the same thing that summer. By 1947-48, however, the New Democracy experiment collapsed as the Communist Party victories seen in some Eastern European countries had resulted largely due to vote rigging and intimidation, revealing that the ideology was not yet strong enough to compete with right-wing and nationalist sentiments.
Relations between the Soviets and the western powers eventually deteriorated with distrust increasing on both sides. As a result, Stalin pursued a more repressive approach and tighter control over Eastern Europe and implemented a cultural crackdown at home - though it was much milder than the purge of the 1930's.
The roots of that deterioration of relations lay partly in the response of the U.S. political class to the events in Europe in 1940. As detailed by historian Stephen Wertheim in his book, Tomorrow the World, foreign policy planners in the U.S. - led by members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) - were alarmed by the Nazi takeover of France in June. The idea that Britain could also fall was now seriously entertained. This prompted a major realignment in internationalist thought within the U.S. political class, from a rather restrained hegemony mostly confined to the western hemisphere and support for international law and disarmament, to a world order dominated by U.S. military supremacy. American national security was broadened to incorporate the objective of not allowing the U.S. to be denied action and influence around the world. This included free economic exchange with the acknowledgment that "trade would extend no further than force allowed, but force would be committed as far as trade necessitated."
The Soviet Union had largely been ignored in these planners' thinking until the Soviets began turning the tide on the Germans in 1943. It was then recognized that the Soviet Union would emerge from the war as a significant world power that would have to be accommodated to some degree within the new U.S. global order. It was initially accepted that the Soviets would have a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. This was permissible as long as enough economic and political openness was afforded to those countries so as not to undermine newly defined U.S. interests. Additionally, anti-Soviet hardliners, such as Leslie Groves and James Byrnes now occupied influential positions within the Truman administration.
Interestingly, the Soviets had begun to recognize the dynamics at play in U.S. political thinking as reflected in Soviet Ambassador Nikolai Norikov's diplomatic telegram of September 1946, considered to be the Soviet counterpoint to Kennan's Telegram. Norikov opens his dispatch with:
"The foreign policy of the United States, which reflects the imperialist tendencies of American monopolistic capital, is characterized in the post-war period by a striving for world supremacy. This is the real meaning of the many statements by President Truman and other representatives of American ruling circles: that the United States has the right to lead the world. All the forces of American diplomacy - the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, industry and science - are enlisted in the service of this foreign policy."
Despite the communist rhetoric, Norikov was not wrong in his assessment of the general goals of U.S. policy in the post-war world. It should be noted that Norikov's points were similar to those being made by others in the Soviet leadership and media at the time so they were not touted as special.
Within this backdrop, it is clear that Kennan's views had been used to justify what was already desired by U.S. supremacists and hardliners in terms of American domination as the Soviet Union was now perceived as a major threat to that agenda. The pursuit of this policy had already been decided upon and would have gone ahead with or without Kennan's assessment, but the Long Telegram provided a convenient intellectual foundation for public rationalization. Kennan, as it turns out, was not driving the policy with his unique acumen but was being used to justify a predetermined policy by the real drivers who resided farther up the political hierarchy.
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