X Article

The X Article, formally titled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", was an article written by George F. Kennan under the pseudonym "Mr. X" and published in Foreign Affairs magazine in July 1947. Kennan, who was the Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States to the USSR from 1944 to 1946, advocated in the article a policy of containment of the Soviet Union and strong anti-communism.

G. F. Kennan rejoined the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as Chargé d'Affaires in July, 1945. Although he was highly critical of the Soviet system, the mood within the U.S. State Department was friendship towards the Soviets, because the Soviets were an important ally in the war against Nazi Germany. Kennan proposed a policy known as Containment.

In February 1946, the United States Treasury asked the U.S. Embassy in Moscow why the Soviets were not supporting the newly created World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In reply, Kennan wrote the Long Telegram outlining his opinions and views of the Soviets; "According to Kennan, the Soviets' view of the world came from a traditional 'Russian sense of insecurity...'" It arrived in Washington on February 22, 1946. Among its most-remembered parts was that while Soviet power was "impervious to the logic of reason", it was "highly sensitive to the logic of force".

The preface to the Long Telegram includes the following comments:

Answer to Dept's 284, Feb. 3,13 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 without yielding to what I feel would be a dangerous degree of oversimplification. I hope, therefore, Dept will bear with me if I submit in answer to this question five parts...I apologize in advance for this burdening of telegraphic channel; but questions involved are of such urgent importance, particularly in view of recent events, that our answers to them, if they deserve attention at all, seem to me to deserve it at once.

Kennan described dealing with Soviet Communism as "undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face". In the first two sections, he posited concepts that became the foundation of American Cold War policy:

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