George F. Kennan: “Long Telegram”

Context

During World War II, the formation and operation of the UN alliance seemed to herald a promising future for the era after the war ended. Old adversaries—the British Empire, the United States, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Republic of China, among others—had mended their diplomatic and political relations to defeat the spread of Nazism and fascism. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, diplomats from all the allied states got together a month later in San Francisco and hammered out rules of engagement and a political structure to keep the United Nations going as a peacekeeping successor to the prewar League of Nations. With the defeat of Japan in September 1945, the future of the United Nations and the cooperation of its membership seemed bright.

At the end of the war, the United States emerged as the richest state the world had ever seen in every respect, with the expectation that American domination of world industry, trade, finance, and service industries would continue indefinitely. The world's postwar currencies were pegged to the American dollar through the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement—as the American economy went, so would the world economy, an unprecedentedly powerful position to operate from in world history. Americans themselves were optimistic about the future and, unlike in 1919, were inclined to embrace their government's role as a world leader rather than withdrawing from the international stage. Life magazine's editor, Henry Robinson Luce, had said in 1942 that the war would be fought to create “a family of nations” that “will require an elder brother, strong, brave and, above all, generous. America must be the elder brother of nations in a brotherhood of man.” Now that vision seemed about to come to pass.

In that “brotherhood of man,” there was no doubt which nation-state had actually provided the most blood necessary to win the war. The Soviet Union's contributions to the Allied war effort dwarfed those of all its military compatriots—in fact, the conservative estimate of twenty-seven million Soviet dead in the war meant that the USSR had lost more than a third of all dead among all combatants on both sides of the war. American and British contributions to the war effort, including the D-day invasion, war supplies, and finances, were minimal in psychological comparison to the piles of Soviet bodies required to subdue the Nazi armies. As a result, the Soviet Union had won a large amount of political credibility from the war. Surely a people would never fight and die for a political regime like that of Soviet Communism under Joseph Stalin if it were not worth the trouble.

Most Americans, both in and outside the administration of Harry Truman, were at least sympathetic to the Soviet Union and its peoples as allies. The people of the USSR themselves believed the Great Patriotic War, as they called it, was the precursor to an opening up of the Stalinist regime. During the war, censorship had been relaxed, limited religious worship had been allowed, and restrictions on movement had been relaxed. Like Luce in the United States, a Soviet editor, Vsevolod Vishnevsky, made a speech in 1944 in which he predicted the Soviet postwar world: “When the war is over, life will become very pleasant. . . . There will be much coming and going, with a lot of contacts with the west. Everybody will be allowed to read whatever he likes. There will be exchanges of students, and foreign travel for Soviet citizens will be made easy.”

Such would not be the case. Stalin had no intention whatsoever of opening up his regime internally. Neither did he or anyone else in his dictatorship expect anything less than to maintain diplomatic, political, and military parity with the United States and all of the Soviet Union's former allies and enemies in the world. Over the course of the next eight years, the Soviet Red Army would continue to occupy the Eastern European states it had invaded during the war, converting their governments to Communist states. Communism's popularity spread in China and the old colonial world, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, the United States lapsed into an internal fear of the spread of Communist spies and agitators, and the goodwill fostered in the UN wartime alliance turned into animosity flung across the chambers of the UN diplomatic peacekeeping organization instead.

Stalin formally announced his intentions in future diplomacy with the West in a speech made in February 1946 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, just six months after the Japanese surrender and less than a year since the end of the war in Europe. In it, he denounced the capitalist states of the West for perpetuating both world wars. In terms of defining state power by the brand-new terms of building atomic bombs, he promised that the Soviet state would “not only . . . overtake but even outstrip the achievements of science beyond the borders of our country.” At about the same time, diplomats of the Truman administration in the United Nations proposed the creation of the International Money Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, two related international organizations established to expedite the economic recovery of Europe and the international stability of currency markets. The Soviet Union's diplomats, sitting on the UN Security Council, vetoed both proposals, to the consternation of U.S. representatives. It seemed impossible that the Soviets could see any sort of threat to international peace in the U.S. extension of its financial power into international markets for the purposes of rebuilding states, of which none needed more financial help than the Soviet Union itself.

George Kennan, then the deputy chief of the mission in Moscow, was momentarily in charge of the American embassy there—previous ambassador W. Averell Harriman had returned to the United States, and a new ambassador had not yet been appointed. Kennan had been writing analytical essays and position papers from Moscow expounding on his negative opinions of the Stalinist regime, but no one seemed to be reading or reacting to them, and he grew increasingly frustrated with what he saw as a confused policy toward the Soviet Union developing in Washington. Now, in February 1946, he suddenly got two requests for information from his government—one from the State Department asking him to clarify the meaning of Stalin' s Bolshoi Theatre speech and the other from the Treasury Department asking why the Soviets would not support the World Bank and the IMF.

Of the two requests, Kennan answered the second by addressing the first: he considered the Treasury Department's naivety as to Soviet intentions as dangerous, and so he gave them what he described as the whole truth, an analysis of the sentiment behind Stalin's speech. Acknowledging in his memoirs that his answer was therefore disproportionate to the question, he also believed his opinions of the Soviet state amounted to a truth that needed to be told. So long as his government was listening, he grasped the opportunity to lay out in detail his understanding of the Soviet state and its leader in an eight-thousand-word telegram, giving not just the immediate but also the deep-seated reasons for why the Soviet Union's institutional paranoia had temporarily scuttled the plan for the IMF and World Bank. The telegram was well received, and Kennan later reworked it as a journal article published in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, signed only as “X.” Kennan's opinions in the telegram and article became the basis of the American foreign policy imperative referred to as “containment.”