Reforms Will Bring ‘a New Russia,’ Kennan Says

George S. Kennan, the primary architect of the U.S. containment policy toward Moscow after World War II, told Congress on Tuesday that the power system that has ruled the Soviet Union since 1917 is breaking up and that the change now under way is largely irreversible.

“This is the end of the Russian Revolution as we have known it for 70 years,” the veteran former diplomat said. “A new Russia will emerge from this which will not resemble (the Soviet Union) of today,” he predicted.

The entire power structure founded on Communist ideology will disappear, Kennan told the first of a series of hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the future of U.S.-Soviet relations. “Russia will have to find something new, something better,” he said.

In terms of U.S. relations, “the time has clearly passed” when the Soviet Union should be viewed as the most probable U.S. military opponent, according to the 85-year-old Kennan, who is now a professor emeritus at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study.

“That country should now be regarded essentially as another great power like other great powers--one, that is, whose aspirations and policies are conditioned outstandingly by its own geographic situation, history and tradition,” he said, rather than being driven by an aggressive ideology.

For the future, Soviet interests will differ from American interests, he added, but these differences can be adjusted by “the normal means of compromise and accommodation.” A first step should be to eliminate as soon as possible the “abnormal military tension” that has dominated U.S.-Soviet relations and then to develop the “positive possibilities” that exist in the relationship, he said.

Kennan is considered one of the six or seven “wise men” who have helped shape U.S. foreign policy in the 20th Century. Scholar and writer as well as diplomat, he helped organize the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in 1947 but is best known as an authority on the Soviet Union, where he has served on and off since 1926. His famous article outlining the containment policy to curb Soviet expansionism appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1947.

Embraced at 1987 Summit

In a current article in the Atlantic magazine, Kennan writes that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev embraced him during a December, 1987, summit reception and said: “We in our country believe that a man may be a friend of another country and remain, at the same time, a loyal and devoted citizen of his own; and that is the way we view you.”

In response to a question from Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), committee chairman, Kennan said that the social and political reform process begun by Gorbachev is now “irreversible in the sense that it is quite impossible to return to the Brezhnev period, and even more impossible to return to conditions under Mr. Stalin.” Leonid I. Brezhnev was the Soviet leader from 1964 until his death in 1982.

Soviet intervention in Eastern Europe, such as the invasion of Hungary in 1956, is no longer a “realistic option” for Moscow, he said. However, he cautioned Baltic and other nationalists to follow a policy of gradual rather than radical change because it will be both more productive and less risky in the long run.

Kennan, who has said that the Cold War now is not so much over but “irrelevant,” declared that “what we are witnessing today in Russia is the breakup of much, if not all, of the system of power by which that country has been held together and governed since 1917. Fortunately, that breakup has been most extensive in the aspects of Soviet power that have been most troublesome” in U.S.-Soviet relations, he said.

The “world-revolutionary ideology, rhetoric and political efforts” of early Soviet leaders is no longer a significant factor in Soviet behavior, he said, and the remnants of Stalin’s terror state are being dismantled by Gorbachev.

Three difficulties remain, however, he said: the inordinate size of the Soviet conventional armed forces, the remnants of Soviet political and military control in East Europe and the U.S.-Soviet rivalry in developing weapons.

The “domestic-political” situation of Gorbachev today is “precarious” in certain ways, particularly since his perestroika, or restructuring, efforts have borne meager results so far, Kennan said. But Gorbachev also has strengths, including results from recent elections, and there is no reason to doubt that any successor would respect agreements that Gorbachev signed, Kennan added.