George Frost Kennan (1904 – 2005) was a highly influential American diplomat and historian, who had played a crucial role in crafting the US foreign policy in the wake of the World War II. His writings inspired the Truman Doctrine and the U.S. foreign policy of "containing" the Soviet Union.
After graduating from Princeton University in 1925, Kennan joined the newly formed U.S. Foreign Service. He first worked in Switzerland and Germany where he pursued studies in the Russian history and culture. In 1931 Kennan was assigned to the legation in Riga, Latvia, where he worked on Soviet economic affairs. Two years later he was assigned to the US Embassy in Moscow where he remained for five years, visiting various parts of the USSR and closely acquainting with the Soviet regime. In 1936 he paid a visit to Georgia, jotting down his perceptions into his journal that he had kept throughout his long career.
Kutais and Tiflis were too much alike to be described separately. They are essentially oriental cities, cities of the Near East. Host sunshine, dust, overcrowding, intense street life, poverty, disease, and deceit seemed to be their main characteristics.
The Georgians are a lazy, dirty, tricky, fiercely proud, and recklessly brave people. They never seem to work unless they have to. The Transcaucasus is the spiritual home of the drug store cowboy[*]. The streets are packed with loafers at all hours of the day.
Transcaucasian filth is the filth of the Orient. Compared to it, Russian filths seems earthy and wholesome.
The Georgians claim to have acquired their trickiness from their dealings with the Armenians. However this may be (and to the outsider it seems an idle question), Tiflis and the entire Transcaucasus seem to be rampant with corruption, speculation, and crookedness. It is commonly believed that every cashier in Tiflis makes an average of two or three hundred rubles a month on the side, by crooked means. Many of the state funds flow into channels other than those for which they were allotted. Arrears in the payment of wages are a chronic evil which not even the best efforts of the state have been able to alleviate. The teachers seem to be the hardest hit in this respect.
The pride of the Georgian is well known. He looks down on all the neighboring races, with the possible exception of the Turk, for whom he has a certain respect as a fighter. The Armenian he hates virulently, and the Russian he holds in contempt.
Being an intense individualist, he has a typically romantic conception of honor and dignity. He will stand being cursed better than he will stand being laughed at. He considers that it is better not to live at all than to live with besmirched dignity. He is willing to fight at the suspicion of a sneer or a slight. As a result of this same individualism, he shows great daring and spirit in an individual, hand-to-hand encounter, but makes comparatively poor material for a military organization. The Caucasian military units (I understand there are two divisions of locally recruited troops stationed in the Transcaucasus) look sloppy in comparison with Russian units.
Although the Georgian nationalists do not like Stalin, they have every reason to be thankful to him. They are still the only remaining independent people of any importance in the Soviet Union. This is borne out by thousands of little indications: by the faces and behavior of the people, even by the number of loafers and beggars in the Tiflis streets.
The Georgians have never regarded themselves as having been conquered by the Russians, or as being a subject race. The Russians, in their view, simply bribed their princes and gained access to their towns. Russian soldiers, they told me, had never subjugated the country districts. At the present time, the Russians were only a tool in the hands of one faction of ambitious Georgians. To hell with them.
Since the [Sergei] Kirov murder [on 1 December 1934], Moscow’s grasp on the Transcaucasus has begun to tighten up. It is doubtful whether Stalin, in the face of the consolidation of his power and his economic successes in Russia, will be willing to tolerate much longer the laziness, the backwardness, the corruption, and the defiant, romantic nationalism of his compatriots.
Georgia will be a hard nut to crack. But Stalin’s nutcracker has cracked hard nuts before, and at the present moment it is stronger than ever. Outside observers who have had an opportunity to study Georgia at close range for a long time feel that this contraction of the Moscow nutcracker, when it occurs, will be the best thing that ever happened to the Georgians…
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[*] In the 1920s and 1930s, the term "drugstore cowboy" referred to a young man who loitered in or around a drugstore for the purpose of meeting women.
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