Seventy-six years ago in a US embassy after dark, America’s man in Moscow dispatched a message that would set the course of the Cold War. His name was George Kennan, and his message was the Long Telegram – a famed 8,000 word treatise on the USSR and its discontents.

‘At the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs,’ Kennen wrote, ‘is a traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.