What was Kennan’s Long Telegram?

Why Kennan wrote it

In February 1946 the State Department asked its Moscow embassy to interpret the hard line Stalin and his colleagues had taken in their election speeches that month, Stalin’s speech of February 9 among them. The reply fell to the embassy’s number two, George Kennan, then in charge as chargé d’affaires and in bed with a fever, a cold and a toothache. He dictated an answer in five parts, telegram 511, and apologized in advance for “this burdening of telegraphic channel.” The questions, he wrote, were “so strange to our form of thought” that a short answer would oversimplify them dangerously. In Washington the cable went from desk to desk, and the Navy secretary, James Forrestal, made it required reading for senior officers.

What it said

The telegram has two halves, a diagnosis and a prescription. The diagnosis traced Soviet hostility not to anything the West had done but to Russia’s past: “At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.” Marxism, Kennan argued, gave the rulers a doctrine that justified dictatorship at home and suspicion abroad. The prescription was calmer than its reputation. Soviet power was “impervious to logic of reason” but “highly sensitive to logic of force,” so it would usually pull back when it met firm resistance. The problem could be solved, he insisted, “without recourse to any general military conflict.” He ended with a warning to his own side.

After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.

From telegram to containment

The word containment is not in the telegram. It appeared in July 1947, when Kennan published an expanded version of his argument in Foreign Affairs under the signature “X,” calling for patient, firm containment of Soviet expansion. The idea shaped the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO. Kennan later complained that he had been misread: he meant political and economic pressure at a few vital points, not military alliances around the globe. The columnist Walter Lippmann attacked the X article in a series of columns he collected as The Cold War (where the name comes from). Kennan, who lived from 1904 to 2005, later served as ambassador in Moscow and Belgrade and spent decades as a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Novikov’s mirror

Seven months later, on September 27, 1946, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Nikolai Novikov, sent Moscow his own survey, written for Foreign Minister Molotov. It read America the way Kennan read Russia. Where Kennan saw an insecure empire, Novikov saw American “monopolistic capital” behind a foreign policy “characterized ... by a striving for world supremacy,” and he offered as proof the US bases far beyond American borders and an arms race. Each author was sure the other side was preparing for war. Novikov’s cable stayed secret for decades and was published only as the Cold War was ending. Read side by side, the two telegrams show each capital taking the other’s moves for a plan of attack (how the Cold War started).