Russia Leaves the War: Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1920

George F. Kennan opens his history of early Soviet American relations with Russia's exit from the First World War, following the confused, often improvised diplomacy between Washington and the new Bolshevik government through the Brest Litovsk negotiations that finally took Russia out of the fighting in March 1918. Kennan traces the mutual suspicion, crossed signals, and missed opportunities on both sides that hardened an already difficult relationship into the deeper antagonism that would define much of the twentieth century, drawing on American diplomatic records alongside the published Russian documents available to Western historians at the time.

Kennan wrote as a career Foreign Service officer and lifelong specialist in Russian affairs rather than as an academic historian by training, and that background shows throughout: the book reads with the practical, close grained understanding of diplomatic maneuvering of someone who had actually conducted this kind of negotiation himself, rather than reconstructed it from the outside. He is unusually willing to credit both sides with genuine confusion rather than settled bad faith, showing American officials working from incomplete and often contradictory information about a revolutionary government whose own intentions toward the wider world were still very much unformed. It is the opening volume of a longer study of Soviet American relations in this period, continued in a companion volume, The Decision to Intervene, and it suits a reader interested in the diplomatic roots of the Cold War, told by one of the American officials most responsible for shaping the policy, containment, that grew directly out of the mistrust this book describes.