At the bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area.

Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between the Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within...

World communism is like a malignant parasite, which feeds only on diseased tissue. This is the point at which domestic and foreign policies meet. Every courageous and incisive measure to solve the internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and the community spirit of our own people is a diplomatic victory over Moscow, worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués.

It is clear that the main element of any United States policy towards the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. It is clear that the United States cannot expect in the foreseeable future to enjoy political intimacy with the Soviet regime. It must continue to regard the Soviet Union as a rival, not a partner, in the political arena. It must continue to expect that Soviet policies will reflect no abstract love of peace and stability, no real faith in the possibility of a permanent happy coexistence of the socialist and capitalist worlds, but rather a cautious, persistent pressure towards towards the disruption and weakening of all rival influence and rival power.

There are not many people who can be said to have changed the shape of the age they lived in, but the American diplomat George Kennan, who has died aged 101, was certainly one of them. Virtually singlehandedly, he established the policy which controlled both sides of the cold war for more than 40 years.

The irony of the US "containment" approach towards the Soviet Union, which Kennan proposed in 1947, was that it assumed exactly the opposite shape to that which he thought he had recommended. The concept emerged from a tiny seed planted when an unknown US Treasury official sent a message to the American embassy in Moscow asking why the Russians were being difficult at the World Bank. The official could never have anticipated the page-upon-page response which clattered into the state department telex room on the afternoon of February 22 1946.

The then US ambassador, Averell Harriman, was on leave and Kennan had been left in charge. "The occasion, to be sure, was trivial," he acknowledged later, "but the implications of the query were not. Here was a case where nothing but the whole truth would do. They had asked for it. Now, by God, they would have it."

Kennan divided his message into five parts so that "each could pass as a separate telegram, and it would not look so outrageously long". What has gone into history as the Long Telegram ran to 8,000 words and triggered a seismic change in superpower relations.

It was a detailed assessment of the psychology of the postwar Soviet regime, and recommended a number of principles to guide Washington's dealings with the Kremlin. Citing Stalin's belief that peaceful coexistence with the west was impossible because of its hostile encirclement of his country, Kennan stressed the Soviet dictator's determination to do everything to advance Soviet might and, simultaneously, reduce the strength of capitalist countries.

He counselled that "this does not represent the natural outlook of the Russian people, who are, by and large, friendly to the outside world, eager for experience of it, eager to measure against it the talents they are conscious of possessing, eager, above all, to live in peace and enjoy the fruits of their own labour."

But the US was obliged to deal with a ruling Soviet elite that would cleave firmly to Stalin's line. These apparatchiks, Kennan argued, lived in an atmosphere of oriental secrecy, with no belief in objective truth. "There is good reason to suspect that this government is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy and I, for one, am reluctant to believe that Stalin himself receives anything like an objective picture of the outside world," he added.

The most effective American response to this situation, he went on, depended on the health of its own society. "World communism is like a malignant parasite, which feeds only on diseased tissue. This is the point at which domestic and foreign policies meet. Every courageous and incisive measure to solve the internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and the community spirit of our own people is a diplomatic victory over Moscow, worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiques."

The telegram caused a sensation in Washington, where it was widely circulated. Its impact on the secretary of state, Dean Acheson, led to Kennan's swift appointment as director of foreign policy planning.

Kennan was an old-fashioned conservative, not a neo-conservative who would use force to impose an American political gospel around the world. He lamented the cult of economic growth, the paving over of nature, the Vietnam War, and the notion that security emanates from a nuclear arsenal that could never be used. His aim was to find the most frugal means for preserving the preeminent power of the United States after World War II.

''This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesirable," Kennan said in a 1999 interview. ''I would like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights. I submit that governments should deal with other governments as such and should avoid unnecessary involvement, particularly personal involvement, with their leaders." One need only recall President Bush's imprudent talk of peering into the pure soul of Russia's President Vladimir Putin to realize that nothing could be more antithetical to the practice of the current Bush administration.

Kennan's original outlines of a containment policy in his famous Long Telegram of 1946 and in his article the following year in the journal Foreign Affairs assumed that the Soviet system was unsustainable, that schisms were inevitable among the disparate communist regimes in Moscow, Beijing, and Belgrade, and that if America and its allies waged a patient political struggle they would inevitably outlast the Soviets. Kennan's drive was not to change the governments in other countries but to keep unavoidable enmities with foreign powers from changing America.

''We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population," Kennan wrote in a Policy Planning Study of 1948. ''In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity."

Kennan was an unabashed elitist and an unsentimental realist in his counsel to statesmen. But when compared with the self-deluding misuse of American power that passes for conservatism today, Kennan's lucid view of the world inspires nostalgia.

George Kennan, the Milwaukee-born scholar-diplomat who died at age 101 Thursday, lived a life not only of rare accomplishment but of paradox. As the author of a policy that urged the political "containment" of the Soviet Union, he was probably the 20th century's most famous U.S. expert on Russia. Yet throughout his long life, he remained shy, introverted and uncomfortable in the limelight. Although he was widely and justly honored for his diplomatic and literary achievements, he always regarded himself as an unappreciated outsider. His two-volume memoirs are replete with wrenching complaints about the unwillingness of Washington to hear and heed his advice. So out of place did he feel that he described himself as a "guest of one's time and not a member of its household."

That brief quote provides a small window not only into Kennan's loneliness and detachment but into the elegance and candor he brought to the writing of his 22 books. It is not surprising that historian John Lewis Gaddis, who is preparing a biography of the diplomat, said Kennan saw himself as a literary figure. "He would have loved to have been a poet, a novelist." No one can read Kennan's memoirs without seeing the author as a fully human being, very much in love with his country and his family and deeply tormented by what he thought was the futility of reasoned argument and the growth of militarism throughout the world.