Rarely has one telegram had such impact. In February 1946 an obscure Russian expert at the United States embassy in Moscow sent his superiors in Washington a long dispatch on American-Soviet relations. The telegram gave the Truman administration the answer it was looking for about how to handle Joseph Stalin. It also made a name for its author, the gloomy but brilliant George Kennan (1904-2005).rnStalin's regime had survived, Kennan wrote, not from communist ideals, which were dying or dead, but from a mixture of brutally stimulated patriotism and police control. The regime would mellow or collapse in time. Meanwhile co-operation was pointless.
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