"From World War to Cold War" by George F. Kennan and John Lukacs, in American Heritage (Dec. 1995), 60 Fifth Ave,, New York, N.Y. 10011.

Revisionist historians have portrayed America's decision in 1947 to oppose the Soviet Union with a policy of "containment" as premature and provocative. Kennan contends, in an epistolary interview conducted by noted historian Lukacs, that, on the contrary, it took Americans too long to come to a realistic view of Joseph Stalin's regime.

When Kennan arrived in Moscow in 1944 after a seven-year absence to serve as deputy to

U.S. ambassador Averell Harriman, he realized with some shock that the Soviet regime "was still indistinguishable from the one that had opposed in every way our policies of the pre-war period, that had entered into the cynical nonaggression pact with the Germans in 1939, and that had shown itself capable of abominable cruelties, little short of genocide," in areas under its control. Kennan did not dispute the need to keep giving the Soviet forces military support, but he saw no reason for "such elaborate courting of Soviet favor as was then going on, or for encouraging our public to look with such high hopes for successful collaboration with the Soviet regime after the war."

The failure of Stalin's regime to come to the aid of the Poles who rose up against the German occupiers in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising should have prompted the United States to make "a thoroughgoing exploration of Soviet intentions" in Europe, Kennan says. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt was reluctant to risk undermining Allied war-time unity.