Frank Roberts and the 'Other' Long Telegram

It is flattering to find my March 1946 despatches from Moscow receiving such careful and sympathetic attention, but embarrassing to 'introduce' them over four decades later. Fortunately, they fell on fertile soil in a receptive Foreign Office under a great Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, and contributed to a more realistic assessment of Stalin's Soviet Union than that pre-alent at the end of the war and after Churchill's departure. I have no quarrel with Dr Greenwood's analogies and conclusions and feel no need to defend what I then wrote with the benefit of hindsight. As compared with George Kennan, I have also been fortunate in that British policies towards the Soviet Union, despite ups and downs in our relations, have remained broadly consistent, with little of the anticommunist hysteria which seized the United States in Senator MacCarthy's time and even more recently in President Reagan's 'Evil Empire' period, or on the other hand of the Gorbymania now prevalent in West Germany. I have not therefore been faced with George Kennan's problem, when released from diplomatic constraints, of regretting hard-line misinterpretations put upon his Moscow despatches and upon his later Mr X article in Foreign Affairs. Another difference between us is that, whilst the Soviet Union has remained an absorbing interest for me, more especially after my return to Moscow in 1948 to negotiate with Stalin on the Berlin Blockade as Ambassador at NATO in the late fifties, and later as Ambassador in Moscow in the early sixties, when I experienced the contrast between Khrushchev's pre-Gorbachev's version of glasnost

Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History

• Worlds apart’

  Michael F Hopkins•Contemporary British History•2000

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• Australia, the security council and the Iranian crisis of 1946

  Christopher Waters•Australian Journal of Political…•1993

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