Evil Empire 57communist ideology had been grafted. This combination, he argued,
was destined to conflict with the innate qualities of Americanism—its
freedom of worship, its emphasis on individuality, and its support of
business. But the dominance of the security sector was another persistent
motif in Kennan’s work; he dedicated five paragraphs of “The Sources
of Soviet Conduct” to the “organs of suppression.” Secret police lurked
everywhere, the narrative went, and prisons were the Soviet Union’s
primary feature. By 1953, under Joseph Stalin, 2.6 million people were
locked up in the gulag and over 3 million more were forcibly resettled—
a total of around 3 percent of the population kept under state control.
Kennan’s point, like those of other foundational Cold War tracts, was
clear: unlike the United States, the Soviet Union was brutally repressive.
The idea that fundamental differences in approaches to incarcera-
tion drove the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union
strikes an odd chord from the vantage of 2018. Today 2.3 million people
are locked up in the United States, and an additional 4.5 million are on
parole or probation, for a total of around 2 percent of the population
under state control. But while much has been written about how legal
changes and racial politics led to the carceral state, it is also helpful to
see how Cold War confrontation further contributed to the United
States’ own gulag.
in the same year Kennan published as X, the National Security Act
created the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency,
and the National Security Council—the building blocks of the national
security state. By 1950, in order to further counter the perceived Soviet
threat, a top secret but widely known report argued that a blank check
for the permanent war economy was needed to establish an offensive