The US State Department received a document from Moscow that went down in history as the "Long Telegram”. The ideas outlined in it became the basis of American foreign policy towards the USSR for almost fifty years.
The US Treasury asked the embassy why the USSR refused to cooperate with the International Monetary Fund (established in July 1945) and the World Bank (established in July 1944). The answer was drafted by US Embassy Counselor George Frost Kennan.
At that time, it was the largest telegraph message – 8,000 words. It took several hours to send. In the preamble, Kennan wrote the following: “Answer to Dept’s 284, Feb 3 involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into single brief message”.
Kennan called the fight against Communism “the greatest challenge our diplomacy has ever faced, and probably the greatest it will ever face”. The American diplomat perceived the Soviet Union's foreign policy mission as a desire to spread the influence of communist ideology and a willingness to confront the West on this basis. However, according to Kennan, the forces were unequal: the Soviet Union had insufficient economic resources, its propaganda was based on the negation of Western values, and the United States could win this confrontation without resorting to a military conflict.
Kennan was fluent in Russian and was considered a Russophile. “Latter are, by and large, friendly to outside world”, his telegram read. “But party line is binding for outlook and conduct of people who make up apparatus of power – party, secret police, and government… The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies”.
In the Soviet translation of the telegram made for Stalin, the word “containment” was replaced by “strangulation”.
After he wrote his telegram, Kennan became the head of the Policy Planning Staff at the US State Department and went down in history as the “architect of the Cold War”.
Sources:
Foreign Affairs Journal, July 1947.
Foreign Relations of the United States. 1946. No. 6., pp. 696-709.