Long Telegram

On February 22, 1946, American diplomat George F. Kennan sent a lengthy telegram from the United States embassy in Moscow to the State Department in Washington, identified by his own dispatch number 511 and remembered as the Long Telegram because it ran past 5,000 words, described as the longest diplomatic telegram the department had ever received. Kennan wrote in response to official questions about Soviet intentions raised after Joseph Stalin's February 9, 1946 speech, dividing his analysis into sections on the historical background of Soviet conduct, its present character, its likely future course, and what all of this meant for American policy. He argued that Soviet leaders, shaped by long-standing Russian insecurity and by Marxist-Leninist ideology, saw the world divided into a socialist and a capitalist camp and believed capitalism was bound to collapse on its own, so the Soviet Union could afford patience while quietly expanding its influence rather than risking open war. Kennan called this Soviet outlook mistaken, arguing that the capitalist states were in fact stable and rarely fought one another, and concluded that meeting the Soviet challenge required American self confidence, careful long range planning on a scale comparable to wartime effort, and a public educated about the nature of the threat. Kennan later expanded these ideas into a 1947 magazine article on the strategy of containment, published under the pseudonym X.