George F. Kennan: “Long Telegram”

About the Author

George Frost Kennan was born on February 16, 1904, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He attended St. John's Northwestern Military Academy in Delafield, Wisconsin, and studied at Princeton University, where he earned his BA in 1925. A cousin, also named George Kennan, worked in the Foreign Service, which inspired his namesake to do the same. Kennan later described his joining the Foreign Service as the first and last sensible decision he ever made regarding his career. His cousin had written a book on Siberia and the late Russian Empire; the 1920s were also an era in which the new Soviet Union that now controlled the old czarist regime's territories was considered a frightening puzzle to world diplomats. From the outside, the men who ran the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics seemed bent on expansion of a violent Communist revolution to the rest of the world, especially to capitalist countries such as the United States. The younger George Kennan thus decided to become an expert on the Soviet Union, becoming fluent in Russian and several other European languages and spending the next quarter century off and on in European cities as a diplomat.

Because the United States did not recognize the Soviet Union at the time, Kennan was next door in Riga, Latvia, while Joseph Stalin rose gradually to power in the 1920s. When the Franklin Roosevelt administration decided to open an embassy in Moscow in 1933, Kennan was one of the diplomats charged with setting it up, and so he also witnessed the implementation of the First Five-year Plan while the rest of the world lapsed into economic depression. Unlike most of his American contemporaries who observed the results of Soviet industrialization and collectivization of agriculture close up and were impressed, Kennan was horrified. Millions died in a man-made famine in the Ukraine and Belarus, and thousands more were shot as enemies of the state for any offense that was thought to hinder the advance of agricultural or industrial production. In a prescient memorandum he sent back to his diplomatic bosses in Riga, Kennan said the Soviet people themselves were already tired of the regime and that Soviet Communism would one day collapse under the weight of its own oppression, violence, corruption, and incompetence. He stayed in Moscow to witness the horrors of Stalin's purges, which turned him implacably against the Soviet regime. Near the end of World War II, he returned to Moscow as a permanent undersecretary to the American ambassador, where he wrote the “Long Telegram” and became famous for his doctrine of “containment” of Soviet ambitions in the world, expecting the internal collapse of the Soviet regime to occur as a result.

His diplomatic career did not last much longer, however. He returned to Moscow as the actual ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1951. In 1952, however, on a visit home to Washington, Kennan described the constraints under which he and other diplomats operated in Stalin's late regime as being worse than those he had experienced in Nazi Germany. Stalin demanded his recall, and other than a brief stint as ambassador to Yugoslavia in the early 1960s, his diplomatic career was finished. Instead, he became a professor working out of Princeton's Institute of Advanced Study, writing histories, memoirs, essays, and speeches for the next fifty years. He proved an incisive critic of the implementation of his foreign policy dictates by politicians: he denounced the racism of U.S. foreign policy, condemned the Vietnam War, and fought against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Still, he never attained another diplomatic position after 1963 and became both agitated and depressed as a result of his exile from the positions of power in American foreign policy. He instead continued to lecture and write as a critic and chronicler of U.S. foreign policy to the end of his life at the age of 101 in 2005.