Did you know?
People were sent to the Gulag for being late to work
FDR’s negotiating technique with Stalin was to “give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return”
Communists in the Eastern European nations subjugated by Stalin jailed bishops, crucified Christians, and forced Catholic priests to consecrate human excrement
When death knocked on Lenin’s door in 1924, Joseph Stalin was ready to succeed him. And Stalin would kill far more than even Lenin managed to wipe out—perhaps merely because he lived longer than his predecessor and partner in crime. Give a communist more time, and more dead people will result. Stalin would rule the Soviet Union from the late 1920s until his death in March 1953.
Born in 1878 in the republic of Georgia, Stalin was originally named Joseph Dzhugashvili. “Stalin” was a pen name meaning “Man of Steel.” He, like Lenin, had a religious upbringing. His mother Ekaterina was a pious woman who sent her son to parochial school and wanted him to become a priest. Stalin actually attended seminary, but was eventually kicked out. At that seminary, which was a liberal one, Stalin digested not only toxic socialist ideas but also Darwinism. Like both Marx and Lenin, Stalin would turn his back on God.
He would quickly become the greatest mass murderer in history, surpassed only by China’s Mao Zedong. And Stalin took the lives of tens of millions of his own citizens through purges, the Gulag, a deliberately created famine, and more. Among these cruel campaigns, Robert Conquest would dub Stalin’s 1934–1938 killing spree “the Great Terror” because it dwarfed even Lenin’s “Red Terror” (circa 1918).1
The Devil Is in the Details
The papal encyclical Divini Redemptoris, issued by Pope Pius XI in 1937, during Stalin’s Great Terror, called communism “pernicious,” “Godless,” “by its nature anti-religious,” a form of “perversity,” a “fury,” “poison,” an “extreme danger,” a “deluge which threatens the world,” a “collectivistic terrorism . . . replete with hate,” and a “plague” that leads to “catastrophe.” Communism was a “satanic scourge” that “conceals in itself a false messianic idea.” It was a form of “class-warfare which causes rivers of blood to flow,” a “savage barbarity.” Marxists were “the powers of darkness,” orchestrating a battle against “the very idea of Divinity.” Communism was a “truly diabolical” instrument of Satan and his “sons of darkness.”4
The number of deaths in this period has been tallied by several sources, including Stalin’s own successor, Nikita Khrushchev, who laid out the “Crimes of Stalin” in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death. As just one indication of the scope of the carnage, consider these incredible numbers of victims from the Soviet military between 1936 and 1938. These were killed in the “Great Purge”—the part of the “Great Terror” that specifically targeted government officials, military officers, and Communist Party members:
• 3 of 5 Soviet marshals
• 13 of 15 army generals
• 8 of 9 admirals
• 50 of 57 corps commanders
• 154 of 186 division generals
• 16 of 16 army commissars
• 25 of 28 army corps commissars2
From May 1937 to September 1938, according to Soviet statistics, 35,020 military officers were arrested and expelled from the Red Army.3 Tens of thousands were executed, often on Stalin’s direct written order. This is not only a shocking crime but a shocking logistical feat. It boggles the mind that Stalin and a handful of select bullies could pull off such a wholesale purge of the men with the guns. But when it comes to killing, one could never underestimate communists. They always exceeded the worst possible scenarios.
Khrushchev and other Soviet officials understood that these actions by this tyrant not only directly killed thousands of their countrymen. Stalin’s purge of the military also indirectly killed millions of Russian boys in World War II, as a hollowed-out officer corps put up ineffective resistance to the Nazi invasion of the Russian homeland, which came only a few years after Stalin’s decimation of the military brass who knew how to fight a war.
Of course, it wasn’t just the military. The purge numbers for Stalin’s political rivals and for society as a whole were worse. Of the nearly two thousand delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress of the USSR in 1934, more than eleven hundred would be shot between 1934 and 1938. Some 70 percent of the 139 members of the 1934 Party Central Committee were executed by 1938. Of the nation’s eighty-one top-ranking political commissars, seventy-six were purged.5
The Wrong Number
Dr. Valentine Kefeli, who lived through the Stalin era in Russia, tells this story: It was three a.m., and there was a knock at the door of his family’s apartment. His father got out of bed and said “I am ready.” But as he answered the door, the men asked, “Is this apartment 52?” “No, it’s apartment 50,” he replied. They departed, and Valentine’s father breathed a sigh of relief. “Everybody was ready to go to the gulag,” recalls Valentine. “We knew that we were members of Animal Farm.”6
As for Soviet society at large, the numbers were on an even ampler scale. Arnold Beichman, the late Hoover Institution expert on communism, estimates that one in every eight Soviet citizens—men, women, children, elderly—perished under Stalin’s Great Terror. That would equate to about twenty million.
Millions of poor souls languished in the Gulag, the Soviet prison system that was a cold symbol of communist repression. Established throughout regions like Siberia, purposefully remote in order to deter inmates from trying to escape, the prison system contained millions of Soviet citizens who were sent to the Gulag beginning in the 1920s, starting under Lenin. They had been sent to the camps for the most minor infractions, ranging from expressing a desire for free elections to being late for work.7
You Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or Cry
“A [Soviet citizen] went to the KGB to report that he lost his parrot. The KGB asked him why he was bothering them. Why didn’t he just report it to the local police? Well, he answered, ‘I just want you to know that I don’t agree with a thing that parrot has to say.’” —joke told by Ronald Reagan in his remarks on the Strategic Defense Initiative to Martin Marietta Denver Astronautics Employees in Waterton, Colorado, November 24, 1987
Countless people perished in the Gulag, victims of the elements, malnutrition, disease, neglect, or execution. This vast prison system was described in The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a survivor who lived to tell the world. Lenin and Trotsky started the Gulag system and referred to its “concentration camps” long before Hitler and the Nazis had set up any such thing,8 but Stalin made even more effective use of the system than Lenin had. In the harsh conditions prisoners were subjected to, they died like flies.
And Stalin also killed millions outside the Gulag. One of his worst crimes was his forced collectivization of agriculture in the Ukraine, which led to the starvation of millions in the former bread basket of the Soviet Union. In this deliberately created famine—which Ukrainians call the Holodomor—huge number of “kulaks” were uprooted and had their land taken. Many of them were carted off to Siberia; many died in the Ukraine. Stalin made it a criminal offense, punishable by imprisonment, for anyone to mention the disaster. This man-made famine starved five to ten million people to death.10
Mass Murder without Shame
When Lady Astor asked him how long he was “going to go on killing people,” Stalin answered, “When it is no longer necessary.”9
How many deaths are attributable to Stalin, in total? For starters, there are his executions, purges, and imprisonments in often deadly conditions. Then there is the famine. Some observers also blame Stalin for the deaths of the tens of millions of Russian boys killed in World War II, primarily by the Nazi blitzkrieg—in which the Soviet Union lost upwards of twenty to thirty million soldiers, some thirty to forty times the combined death toll of British and American losses in the war. Stalin, after all, helped launched World War II in the first place. His August 1939 “non-aggression” pact—the so-called Hitler-Stalin Pact, or Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact—with Hitler enabled the September 1 invasion of Poland by Germany, which triggered World War II. (Later the same month, Russia also attacked Poland.) In June 1941, Hitler betrayed Stalin, sending his war machine into the USSR—and the rout was on. As we have seen, Stalin had so decimated his own military command that Russia lacked the veteran military leadership to slow Hitler—a major reason for the staggering Russian wartime losses.
Tardiness Will Not Be Tolerated
“For five minutes late, you got an administrative write up—a memo in your records. For 20 minutes, you got the gulag.”
—Valentine Kefeli11
The Russian people suffered horribly in the war that Stalin had helped start. But Stalin himself—despite having crippled his own military in the Great Purge—ultimately achieved many of his original goals in World War II. In a recently declassified Soviet document, a secret address by Stalin to the Plenum of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party on August 19, 1939, mere days before the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the dictator averred, “The dictatorship of a Communist Party may be envisaged only as a result of a great war.” As he explained, “It is in the interests of the USSR—the Fatherland of the Workers—that war should break out between the Reich and the Franco-British capitalist bloc.” The “non-aggression” pact Stalin would shortly sign with Hitler was not about preventing a world war; on the contrary, it was meant to bring it on and prolong it: “It is for these reasons that we must give priority to the approval of the conclusion of the pact proposed by Germany, and to work so that this war, which will be declared within a few days, shall last as long as possible.”
The Devil Is in the Details
Besides taking the lives of millions, Stalin was guilty of destroying priceless artifacts. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Moscow’s most ornate church, positioned on the banks of the Moscow River near the Kremlin, was dynamited at his behest.12 Czar Alexander I had dedicated the church in gratitude to Divine Providence for saving Russia from Napoleon in 1812. It was the pride of Russia, with priceless artwork adorning the towering ceilings. In December 1931, Stalin had the ornate structure dynamited and reduced to rubble. The demolition was not simple: it took more than one blast, and it was not easy to find a construction worker willing to set it off. Rumors abounded in Moscow that Stalin set off the demolition explosion himself—and it would have been fitting for the most unholy man in Russia to do the dirty deed.
Stalin planned to replace the majestic structure with another monument to himself and his ideology. In the place of the cathedral, the communists would erect a sacred Palace of Soviets. But the incompetence of central planning—or perhaps an act of God—delayed construction, as the site was flooded with water from the nearby river. Ultimately, the mess was converted into a large municipal swimming pool.
Why did Stalin want a world war? Because he believed it would ultimately result in the spread of communism to the whole world: “We have before us a vast field of action to develop the world Revolution, Comrades!” The communist dictator imagined the possibility of a “Soviet Germany,” of the “Sovietization of France,” and much more.13
The signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in August 1939 achieved Stalin’s initial goal: precipitating the Second World War. In short order, just as planned, on September 1, 1939, Poland was invaded from the West by Germany, prompting war declarations from Britain and France. Not long thereafter, Poland was also invaded from the East by the USSR. The world war that ensued would take the lives of upwards of forty to fifty million boys worldwide—ironically, as we have seen, more boys died from the USSR than any other nation. But, as we shall see below, it also enabled Stalin to achieve a good measure of his original purpose in precipitating the war. The “Sovietization of France” never happened, but he got half the “Soviet Germany” he wanted—plus all the nations of Eastern Europe.
War Crime
Stalin was also guilty of a large number of non-Russian deaths in the war, of course. He is responsible, for example, for the Katyn Woods massacre, one of the twentieth century’s worst war crimes. When the Nazis and Bolsheviks jointly invaded, annihilated, and partitioned Poland, the Soviets seized thousands of Polish military officers as prisoners. Their fate was sealed on March 5, 1940 when Stalin personally signed their death warrant, condemning 21,857 of them to “the supreme penalty: shooting.” We have the actual NKVD document ordering the massacre. The officers were taken to three execution sites, the most infamous of which is the Katyn Forest, twelve miles west of Smolensk, Russia. The Bolsheviks covered their crime with a layer of dirt.14
Most estimates of Stalin’s death toll leave out the wartime numbers, instead focusing on the tyrant’s killing by famine, by execution, and within the walls of the forced labor-camp system. How many victims figure in this list?
As we have seen, Alexander Yakovlev, the lifelong Soviet apparatchik who in the 1980s became a chief reformer and close aide to Mikhail Gorbachev, and who, in the post-Soviet 1990s, was tasked with the grisly assignment of trying to total the victims of Soviet repression, estimates that Stalin alone was responsible for the deaths of sixty to seventy million people, a stunning number (and two to three times higher than the tally in The Black Book of Communism). Whatever the precise figure, Stalin’s cruelty was indisputably staggering. The Soviet dictator was a superb practitioner of the death he preached. Only the Red Chinese, who had many more potential victims at their disposal, killed so many innocent citizens.
It was this bloodthirsty fiend that American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt fondly called “Uncle Joe”—and said had taught him how “a Christian gentleman should behave.” FDR was immensely impressed by the communist dictator when the Big Three—Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill—met at the Tehran Conference in 1943. FDR wondered where Stalin might have acquired the virtue that FDR somehow saw radiating from this man, and speculated that it might have been the dictator’s youthful training for the priesthood.
Roosevelt’s faith in Stalin was blind. He resisted ample evidence of the dictator’s real character and was deaf to the warnings of some of his own aides. William Bullitt, for example, FDR’s first ambassador to the USSR, had once been so gushingly pro-Bolshevik that he planted a literal kiss on Stalin’s cheek. But he had awakened to the unmistakable death stench that was Stalinism. He warned FDR against the bloodthirsty thug in the Kremlin, but the president wouldn’t listen: “Bill, I don’t dispute your facts [or] the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry [Hopkins] says he’s not and that he doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.”
“If I give him everything I possibly can”? “Noblesse oblige”? “Will work with me for a world of democracy and peace”? FDR was referring to Joseph Stalin.
A stunned Bullitt argued with FDR, informing the American president that he was dealing not with a British duke but with “a Caucasian bandit, whose only thought when he got something for nothing was that the other fellow was an ass.” Uncle Joe’s jackass, if you will.
Bullitt tried to tell FDR that there was no “factual evidence” that Stalin was a good man. FDR, however, felt differently. He saw Stalin as a “kind” man, a gentleman, one he could work with to advance democracy and peace. The president told Bullitt: “It’s my responsibility, not yours, and I’m going to play my hunch.”16
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century by Paul Kengor (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2010).
Roosevelt wouldn’t believe either his own aide or the evidence on Katyn Woods either. The Soviet massacre there was first exposed by the Nazis—who by then had betrayed the Hitler-Stalin Pact—in April 1943. The Germans discovered the mass graves and immediately converted the atrocity into a propaganda coup to try to split the Big Three Allies. But Stalin and his goons attempted to pin the massacre on Hitler and his goons. Stuck in between was the civilized world, which sought to determine which devil had done the deed.
FDR was inclined to give “Uncle Joe” the benefit of the doubt. Nonetheless, he realized the need to take a close look. Thus, he dispatched George Earle, former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, a war hero, a diplomat, and a presidential special emissary, to investigate.
In short order, Earle discerned the obvious, which was not what FDR wanted to hear. FDR needed Russia and Stalin to help vanquish the Nazis, and this killing field created by America’s wartime ally would not look good to the American public. In any case, Roosevelt always wanted to think the best of Stalin.
Earle made his case: “About this Katyn massacre, Mr. President. I just cannot believe that the American president and so many people still think it is a mystery or have any doubt about it. Here are these pictures. Here are these affidavits and here is the invitation of the German government to let the neutral Red Cross go in there and make their examination. What greater proof could you have?”
More Useful Idiots
H. G. Wells raved about Stalin, “I’ve never met a man more candid, fair, and honest . . . Everyone trusts him.” Wells said this upon his return from a meeting with Stalin in 1934 amid the launch of the Great Terror.17
Wells’s fellow socialist, George Bernard Shaw, was also impressed. He reprimanded people in the West who dared to arrogantly judge their democracies superior to Stalin’s state: “We cannot afford to give ourselves moral airs when our most enterprising neighbor [the Soviet Union] humanely and judiciously liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators to make the world safe for honest men.”18 Shaw dismissed reports of famine in the USSR as a “lie” and as “inflammatory irresponsibility”—a “slander” of Stalin’s Five Year Plan.19
Fabian Socialist, Bertrand Russell, also drank the communist Kool-Aid on his 1920 tour of the Bolshevik utopia: “I believe that Communism is necessary to the world, and I believe that the heroism of Russia has fired men’s hopes,” proclaimed the English intellectual. “Bolshevism deserves the gratitude and admiration of all the progressive part of mankind.” Bolshevism, said Russell, was a “splendid attempt” on behalf of the future of humanity.20
FDR replied, “George, the Germans could have rigged things up.” Earle was frustrated. As he later put it in his testimony for a Congressional investigation of Katyn, Roosevelt was adamant that the claims were “entirely German propaganda and a German plot.” The president told his special emissary: “I’m absolutely convinced that the Russians didn’t do this.” An amazed Earle responded, “Mr. President, I think this evidence is overwhelming.”
But FDR refused to believe the evidence. Earle saw Roosevelt’s denial of Katyn as a microcosm of how the USSR had “deceived” too many Americans; he later said he felt “hopeless” about the president’s unwarranted faith in Stalin.21
Roosevelt and many other New Deal liberals were deceived by Stalin, who preyed on their naivety. But not everyone in his administration was so innocent. Consider the case of Harry Hopkins. This was the “Harry” whose assurances that Stalin was “not that kind of man” FDR had quoted to William Bullitt to defend his blind trust in the dictator.
Hopkins was born in 1890 in Sioux City, Iowa; his father was a small businessman and his mother a devout Methodist. As a young man he left the Midwest for New York City, where he took a bite of the Big Apple’s rotten left-wing politics. By the 1920s, he was active in a number of progressive causes, with a special interest in social work. He became executive director of the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration under New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, where his management of welfare policy impressed not only the governor but the governor’s wife. Eleanor was a big fan of Harry Hopkins. When her hubby won the presidency, they immediately enlisted Harry’s help.
In March 1933, in the new president’s landmark Hundred Days, Hopkins was summoned to Washington to spearhead relief at the federal level. He had so much influence with FDR that he would become one of the principal architects of the New Deal, of particularly the relief programs within the Works Progress Administration. Under Hopkins, the WPA became one of the largest employers in all of the United States. Only after his death in 1946 did we begin learning concrete information on the dealings Harry Hopkins had with communists.
Evidence from the Soviet side began emerging in the 1960s. The sources include Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB officer and one of the most knowledgeable defectors ever to leave the Soviet Union, and Iskhak Akhmerov, a high-level Soviet official who worked inside the United States during World War II. Gordievsky began working undercover for British intelligence a decade before his defection and continued to do so until he was reportedly exposed by CIA traitor Aldrich Ames.
Both of these Soviet officials called Hopkins an “agent,” with Gordievsky calling him an agent of “major significance.” Akhmerov, who was also in contact with Alger Hiss, described Hopkins as “the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States.” Akhmerov claimed to have been in contact with Hopkins well before Hopkins’s first visit to Moscow in July 1941. In fact, one of FDR’s closest aides was quite possibly working with the Soviets.
More information on Hopkins emerged decades later. Herb Romerstein and Eric Breindel, the principal researchers of the Venona transcripts—secret wartime communiqués between the Soviet Union and American communists decrypted by U.S. codebreakers—concluded that Harry Hopkins was a member of Lee Pressman’s “study group” inside the Department of Agriculture (DOA). Pressman was a cell leader of one of the infamous Hal Ware’s communist cells within the Department of Agriculture.
Involvement with the Pressman group would not necessarily mean that Hopkins was a communist, let alone a KGB mole. But Romerstein and Breindel also concluded that Hopkins seems to be the only member of the Pressman group who can be definitively linked to Soviet espionage.
There are many Venona messages to or from Hopkins. Hopkins was in contact with Soviet officials as high up as Ambassador Maxim Litvinov and even Andrei Gromyko. Hopkins eventually had repeated discussions with Stalin himself, including some in FDR’s absence. Many of those interactions were appropriate to Hopkins’s role in the Roosevelt administration, but others are suspicious.
One Venona report, dated May 29, 1943, and signed by Akhmerov, reports secret discussions between FDR and Churchill that were inappropriately channeled to the Soviet government. Those discussions were relayed by Soviet agent “19,” who is believed to have been Harry Hopkins.22
There is still debate over whether Harry Hopkins was a communist spy, loyal to the Soviet Union, or another duped New Deal liberal.23 The leading authority on Venona, however, was convinced that Hopkins served the other side. “He was a dedicated Soviet agent,” Romerstein told me categorically. “He was both a spy, that is, he supplied information, and an agent of influence.” Hopkins was not a dupe, said Romerstein, but one who sought out dupes.24
And he found one in the Oval Office. Hopkins was the president’s right-hand man, chief political adviser, confidant, troubleshooter, and sometimes diplomat. FDR saw him more than he saw any aide. “You’ll learn what a lonely job this is,” said a vulnerable FDR to presidential aspirant Wendell Wilkie, “and you’ll discover the need for somebody like Harry Hopkins, who asks for nothing except to serve you.”
Hopkins alone arguably wielded more power than the State Department, given the total faith placed in him by Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt. He accompanied President Roosevelt to the major conferences of World War II: Casablanca, Tehran, and Yalta. Nowhere was he more instrumental than on American policy toward the Soviet Union, including the Lend-Lease program. FDR sent him to Moscow to negotiate with Stalin. He may even have helped Stalin acquire nuclear weapons by securing uranium for the Soviet a-bomb.25 And it’s beyond dispute that he encouraged FDR in his naïve trust and admiration of Stalin.
Roosevelt’s bizarre affinity for the mass murderer would be very costly for the peoples of Eastern Europe. Joseph Stalin viewed the chaos at the end of World War II as an opportunity. Surveying post-WWII Eastern Europe, Stalin salivated, “Whoever occupies the territory also imposes on it his own social system as far as his military can reach.”26 That was the edict sent forth to Stalin’s commissars. Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, described his job: “I saw my task as minister of foreign affairs as being how to expand the boundaries of our Fatherland. And it seems to me that we and Stalin did not [do] badly in this task.”27
Not badly at all. But Stalin was significantly helped along by Roosevelt, who essentially abandoned the nations of Eastern Europe to the hands of the communist dictator at the Yalta Conference, held on Stalin’s home turf in Crimea from February 4 to 11, 1945. At Yalta, FDR was totally rolled by Uncle Joe.
FDR’s hagiographers today try to excuse his decisions at Yalta, but the hard truth is that the president himself knew that the Yalta agreement was a very bad one. “I didn’t say the result was good,” he told his close adviser Adolf Berle when he returned home. “I said it was the best I could do.” Admiral Bill Leahy complained to FDR, “Mr. President, this [agreement] is so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without technically breaking it.” In response, FDR sighed, “Bill, I know it. But it’s the best I can do for Poland at this time.”
Merely six weeks after the conference, on March 23, 1945, FDR told Anna Rosenberg, “Averell [Harriman] is right. We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” By that point he knew that Stalin had taken advantage of him.
When the Soviets saw weakness, they preyed upon it. FDR was physically and mentally weak at Yalta—he would die just two months later—and, one might argue, was ideologically weak as well. He was another liberal who was vulnerable prey to a master communist manipulator like Stalin. Unfortunately, FDR realized that too late.
In a letter to Stalin on April 1, 1945, FDR lamented. “I cannot conceal from you the concern with which I view the development of events of mutual interest since our fruitful meeting at Yalta.” Stalin surely chortled at that one.
But however concerned FDR was, the Eastern Europeans had much more cause for worry. When World War II ended, the Red Army permanently occupied the Eastern European nations from Poland to Bulgaria, setting up communist governments up and down the continent. Stalin violated the promises he had made to President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at Yalta to allow free and unfettered democratic elections in those nations.
Instead, Stalin forcibly extended Soviet communism into Eastern and Central Europe following World War II. The Comintern had been technically abolished (in name only) in the early 1940s in order to appease the Allies during the war, but the Soviets had not abandoned their mission of spreading communism to the whole world. How could they? That was Marx’s mandate. And Stalin would have far greater success in the task than Lenin ever had.
The two principal Western leaders who opposed Stalin were President Harry Truman and ex-Prime Minister Churchill. Truman had succeeded Roosevelt in April 1945, and gotten a rude awakening about America’s wartime ally. When FDR died suddenly, his vice president, Harry Truman, had to step into some very big shoes. Truman at first was not entirely sure of Joe Stalin’s precise intentions. He didn’t know exactly what he would be facing from Moscow, though he soon learned it wouldn’t be good.
A Pox on Both Their Houses
“If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.” —Senator Harry Truman’s policy advice in 1941, at the time Hitler invaded the USSR28
Truman became more skeptical of communism than FDR. His own private acronym for the USSR was “R.G.P.S.,” for “Russian Godless Pervert System.” “I’ve no faith in any totalitarian state, be it Russian, German, Spanish, Argentinian, Dago [Italian], or Japanese,” he said. “They all start with a wrong premise—that lies are justified and that the old, disproven Jesuit formula, the ends justify the means, is right and necessary to maintain the power of government. I don’t agree, nor do I believe that either formula can help humanity to the long hoped for millennium.” Truman averred that an “Honest Communism,” akin to something closer to what is “set out in the ‘Acts of the Apostles,’ would work. But Russian Godless Pervert Systems won’t work.”29
The first salvo across Truman’s bow, exactly one year after Yalta, was Stalin’s February 9, 1946 Bolshoi Theater speech, blaming capitalism and the West—not Nazism, or Stalin’s own pact with Hitler—for causing World War II.30
With the war over, Stalin was unmasked and unafraid. Truman advisers like the distinguished Paul Nitze interpreted the Bolshoi speech as tantamount to a Soviet declaration of World War III. It was such a wake-up call that within only days of the speech, a young staff officer named George Kennan submitted what became known as his “Long Telegram,” sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow to the United States. That historic analysis by Kennan is credited with the doctrine of containment, which became the long-term U.S. policy for dealing with the Soviet Union until President Ronald Reagan’s policy of “rollback”—that is, actively reversing the USSR.
The Bolshoi Theater speech came in the context of blatant Soviet violations of the Yalta agreement. Not only was Stalin reneging on his commitment to free elections. The Red Army, which had never left the portions of Eastern Europe it had “liberated” during World War II, was committing all sorts of heinous war crimes throughout defeated Europe, especially in the eastern portion of Germany, where, as historian Antony Beevor records, Red Army soldiers were guilty of an estimated two million rapes of German women, thousands of whom committed suicide. There was a 90 percent abortion rate among impregnated German women.31
By the time of the Bolshoi Theater speech, Winston Churchill was no longer prime minister of Britain. He and his fellow conservatives had been replaced the previous summer by Clement Attlee and the Labour Party. Churchill and his work, however, were hardly finished. He had been called upon to save Western civilization at the start of the decade, when vandals from Hitler’s Germany were at the gates. Now, Churchill perceived new vandals on the rampage.
Worse, the West, lulled into complacency and understandably tired of fighting after losing tens of millions of precious sons in history’s most brutal war, were slow to recognize the threat. So the former British prime minister took it upon himself to travel to the United States to issue a wake-up call to the free world. He gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in the town of Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, at the invitation of President Truman, whose home was not far down the road in Independence. The audacity of Churchill’s words stunned America:
Containing the Soviets
George Kennan is one of the great names in twentieth-century diplomatic history. Kennan warned that when the Soviets put their signature to a document, it was for calculated purposes only, and should not be trusted. Kennan underscored the cynical relativistic thinking about morality that marred the Marxist mind:
This means that truth is not a constant but is actually created, for all intents and purposes, by the Soviet leaders themselves. It may vary from week to week, from month to month. It is nothing absolute and immutable—nothing which flows from objective reality. It is only the most recent manifestation of the wisdom of those in whom the ultimate wisdom is supposed to reside, because they represent the logic of history.
“The Soviet concept of power,” wrote Kennan, “requires that the Party leadership remain in theory the sole repository of truth. . . . The leadership of the Communist Party is therefore always right.” Since “they alone knew what was good for society”—and since their word was absolute, “immutable,” infallible, “secure and unchallengeable”—the Soviet leadership was “prepared to recognize no restrictions, either of God or man, on the character of their methods.”
Kennan warned that the “Soviet governmental machine” would act without reservation to implement the expansionary doctrine (or whatever else) dictated by the leadership. “Like the white dog before the phonograph,” wrote Kennan, “they hear only the ‘master’s voice.’ And if they are to be called off from the purposes last dictated them, it is the master who must call them off.”
Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies. . . .
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow.
Churchill conceded that these were tough words on the “morrow of a great victory.” They were not the words of peace the world desperately wanted to hear on the heels of a bitter but well-earned triumph over Nazism, a victory in which Stalin’s Russia had been an uneasy ally to the United States and the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, said Churchill, the West should not be blind to reality, and should not try to wish away the danger that he judged was clearly present.
The former prime minister spoke the truth. But America didn’t want to hear it.
President Truman was taken aback by the outrage that many Americans expressed toward the Iron Curtain speech. He himself had not yet evolved into the strong anti-communist that he would later become, but he was still surprised by the animosity toward Churchill. When confronted by angry reporters, Truman distanced himself from the former prime minister.32 According to historian James Humes, Churchill was so floored by Truman’s lack of public support that he did not recover until he found a friendly smile (and a drink) at the Gettysburg home of World War II pal Dwight Eisenhower.
Soft on Communism, Hard on Churchill
Eleanor Roosevelt was furious at Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech. She accused the courageous prime minister of “desecrating the ideals for which my husband gave his life.” She publicly sneered, “Perhaps it’s just as well that he is not alive today to see how you have turned against his principles.”
Journalist David Brinkley, who covered the Iron Curtain speech, recalled that his fellow pressmen were appalled; they thought Churchill had lost his mind.33 That was also the conclusion of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who responded to the speech by denouncing Churchill.34
Yet, while the rest of the world covered its eyes, Churchill sounded his trumpet. Churchill was no Johnny-come-lately to the Bolshevik threat. With bracing foresight, Churchill had said in April 1919, long before anyone else, that “of all the tyrannies in history,” the Bolshevik regime was “the most destructive, the most degrading.” He described the Bolsheviks as “ferocious baboons,” and told the cabinet of Prime Minister Lloyd George that it “might as well legalize sodomy as recognize the Bolsheviks.”35 At that point, Vladimir Lenin was just getting started, and Joseph Stalin had not yet seized the helm as captain of the dictatorship.
While everyone remembers the “Iron Curtain” speech, few today recall that Churchill specifically called Soviet communism a threat to “Christian civilization.” Churchill had hit the bullseye.
And we know the rest of the sad story.
In short, painful order came more affronts to freedom by Stalin. In the grim year of 1948 a communist coup in Czechoslovakia was followed by the Berlin Blockade, the latter a direct violation of Yalta, with the Red Army blocking all road and rail routes into Berlin, where the American, British, and French occupation zones comprised an island of freedom in the sea of Russian-controlled East Germany. It was a brazen, bellicose act. The Cold War was on.
In no time, the two sides—West and East Europe—were starkly divided into adversarial military alliances: NATO in the West, and the Warsaw Pact in the East.
The fall of Czechoslovakia and also Hungary to communism was a sad fate for two nations that had shown such promise in the years between World War I and II. For the newly created Czechoslovakia, in particular, the inter-war years had been a golden age, as the young nation seemed poised to offer the world an example of freedom and democracy to be emulated elsewhere. Stalin’s subjugation made Czechoslovakia another kind of example: one of the new “captive nations” of Eastern Europe.
The Eastern Europeans’ plight was gruesome. Under their new communist governments, they were subjected to the same kind of persecution and terror that the Russian people had first experienced under Lenin, and that Stalin had only made worse. We have already met Richard Wurmbrand, the Christian pastor who endured fourteen years of hell in a Romanian prison. He detailed some of the unspeakable cruelty he witnessed in testimony before the U.S. Congress and in his famous Tortured for Christ, first published in 1967:
Thousands of believers from churches of all denominations were sent to prison at that time. Not only were clergymen put in jail, but also simple peasants, young boys and girls who witnessed for their faith. The prisons were full, and in Romania, as in all communist countries, to be in prison means to be tortured. . . .
A pastor by the name of Florescu was tortured with red-hot iron pokers and with knives. He was beaten very badly. Then starving rats were driven into his cell through a large pipe. He could not sleep because he had to defend himself all the time. If he rested a moment, the rats would attack him.
He was forced to stand for two weeks, day and night. . . . Eventually, they brought his fourteen-year-old son to the prison and began to whip the boy in front of his father, saying that they would continue to beat him until the pastor said what they wished him to say. The poor man was half mad. He bore it as long as he could, then he cried to his son, “Alexander, I must say what they want! I can’t bear your beating anymore!” The son answered, “Father, don’t do me the injustice of having a traitor as a parent. Withstand! If they kill me, I will die with the words, ‘Jesus and my fatherland’.” The communists, enraged, fell upon the child and beat him to death, with blood spattered over the walls of the cell. He died praising God. Our dear brother Florescu was never the same after seeing this.36
Defenestration in Prague
Stalin used brutal methods to subjugate the Eastern European nations to Soviet rule. When the Czech parliament voted to accept America’s generous offer of Marshall Plan aid, which had been offered to all of Europe, West and East, after World War II, a seething Stalin summoned the Czech leadership to Moscow, including foreign minister Jan Masaryk, the son of the founder of the modern Czech state, and ordered them to return home and overturn the action of the parliament and reject Marshall Plan aid. On the plane home, Masaryk lamented that he had left Prague a free man and was returning a slave to Stalin. He would soon die in a “suicide” leap from his window—really a murder, it has long been suspected—amid the tumult in the communist coup that followed. Czechoslovakia’s fate was sealed. By early 1948, the Red flag was flying over Prague.
Wurmbrand’s captors carved him in a dozen separate parts of his body. They burned eighteen holes in him.
“What the communists have done to Christians surpasses . . . human understanding,” he wrote. Wurmbrand said that communist torturers often told him, “There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.” Wurmbrand described crucifixion at the hands of communists. Christians were tied to crosses for four days and nights:
The crosses were placed on the floor and hundreds of prisoners had to fulfill their bodily necessities over the faces and bodies of the crucified ones. Then the crosses were erected again and the communists jeered and mocked: “Look at your Christ! How beautiful he is! What fragrance he brings from heaven!” . . . [A]fter being driven nearly insane with tortures, a priest was forced to consecrate human excrement and urine and give Holy Communion to Christians in this form. This happened in the Romanian prison of Pitesti. I asked the priest afterward why he did not prefer to die rather than participate in this mockery. He answered, “Don’t judge me, please! I have suffered more than Christ!” All the biblical descriptions of hell and the pains of Dante’s Inferno are nothing in comparison with the tortures in communist prisons.
This is only a very small part of what happened on one Sunday and on many other Sundays in the prison of Pitesti. Other things simply cannot be told. My heart would fail if I should tell them again and again. They are too terrible and obscene to put in writing. . . .
On December 26, 1946, the Hungarian communists celebrated the Christmas season by arresting Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty. They would devote the next twenty-three years to torturing and repressing and silencing him.
The Devil Is in the Details
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century, said that the communists had failed to convince the world that there is no God. Rather, he quipped, they had succeeded only in convincing the world that there is a devil.37
During a sensational communist show trial, Mindszenty “confessed” before his accusers, a confession widely believed to have been obtained through drugging and five weeks of torture at the notorious secret police headquarters in Budapest. The kangaroo court sentenced him to life in prison.38
Mindszenty spent the next eight years in solitary confinement. He was released in 1955 because of ill-health but kept under surveillance. During the 1956 Hungarian uprising, he was freed by rebel forces. Rather than flee, he took residency in the U.S. embassy, refusing to leave his country unless the communist government rescinded his conviction, which, under pressure from the Kremlin, it would not do. He offered up his suffering in the form of what Fulton Sheen would describe as “The Dry Martyr of Hungary.”39
Mindszenty concluded that communism is “a kind of religion” that “knows no God, no immortal soul.”40
Stalin put the brutal communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe in place, but they survived his death—and continued to persecute their people—until the late 1980s, when communism even in Russia was near collapse.
You Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or Cry
“The strength of the Solidarity movement in Poland demonstrates the truth told in an underground joke in the Soviet Union. It is that the Soviet Union would remain a one-party nation even if an opposition party were permitted, because everyone would join the opposition party.” —Ronald Reagan, address to the British Parliament, Royal Gallery at the Palace of Westminster, London, June 8, 1982
In October 1984, three thugs from communist Poland’s secret police seized and beat Jerzy Popieluszko, then bound and gagged and stuffed him into the trunk of their Fiat automobile. This gentle priest was the courageous chaplain to Solidarity, the Polish labor movement that—along with the Polish pontiff, Pope John Paul II—was the core of Poland’s crucial fight for freedom that would ultimately bring down Soviet communism.41
Father Jerzy’s first beating that evening was so severe that it should have killed him. But somehow the priest was managing to survive as he fought for his life in the cold, dark trunk of the Fiat. He managed to untie the ropes that bound him and extricate himself from the car. He began to run, shouting to anyone who could hear, “Help! Save my life!”
He was run down by one of the goons, who unleashed his club upon the priest’s head with a fury and ferocity as if he were possessed. Then the priest’s tormentors grabbed a roll of thick adhesive tape and ran it around his mouth, nose, and head, tossing him once again in the vehicle like a hunk of garbage on its way to the dump. After that came yet another thrashing still, with one of the communist secret police ultimately delivering a deadly blow to the priest’s skull.
The killers drove to a spot at the Vistula River. They tied two heavy bags of stones, each weighing nearly twenty-five pounds, to the priest’s ankles. They lifted his body above the water and then quietly let him go. It sunk into the blackness below them.
The killers felt an immediate sense of guilt. They drove away, downing a bottle of vodka to try to numb their consciences. “Now we are murderers,” one of them thought to himself.42
They were indeed guilty of murder. Of course, so was the communist system they represented. Father Jerzy Popieluszko was one of countless martyrs of communism. The communists let flow a veritable river of blood.
And Stalin was the bloodiest tyrant among them—up to the time of his death.
Ultimately, the man responsible for the murder of tens of millions could not escape the great equalizer. Death came for the death-dealing torturer on March 5, 1953, and it wasn’t pretty. He lay in unbearable pain, a severe stroke having rendered his right side paralyzed. Fittingly, considering the horrible deaths suffered by so many of his victims, it would be a three-day death by torture.
The final hours for the “Man of Steel” constituted a slow asphyxiation, a steady strangulation. His daughter Svetlana would describe his “horrible death agony,” a true story that one commenter would describe as a scene right out of Dostoevsky.43 During his last hours, his face altered and turned dark, his lips black, and his features unrecognizable.44
After having been unresponsive for hours, with his eyes closed, Stalin summoned his strength for a final effort. Looking as if he were hallucinating, and apparently trying to wave away the walls that he thought were closing in on him, the dictator suddenly opened his eyes and shot a terrified glance at the assemblage of atheist communists gathered in the room. Then, amid his last gasps, “something incomprehensible and awesome happened that to this day I can’t forget and don’t understand,” said Svetlana. The tyrant managed to raise half his body from the bed and then held up a defiant left fist as if he were shaking it at something in the heavens he had long ago forsaken and despised. “He suddenly lifted his hand as though he were pointing to something above,” recorded Svetlana, “and bringing down a curse on us all.”46
Keep Clapping, Comrade!
There is no better account of the terror-cowed culture of Stalinism than Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s classic, The Gulag Archipelago. On page sixty-nine of the first volume is this chilling account:
At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up. . . . For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, “the stormy applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.
However, who would dare to be the first to stop? . . . After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! . . .
[The comrades] couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?
The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! . . .
Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! . . . To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!
That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him. . . . After he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:
“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”45
Those present—the cursed—included the highest hierarchy of the Soviet state: Bulganin, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Khrushchev, and the diabolical secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, who Svetlana even amid her tear-filled account of her father’s death could not resist describing as an “utterly degenerate,” “obscene,” “repulsive,” “cruel,” and “cunning” “monster.”47
They all watched Stalin in horror as he screeched something inaudible. “The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace,” said Svetlana, “and no one could say to whom or what it might be directed.” The very next moment, she said, after a final effort, “the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh.”48 Stalin sunk motionless into his pillow, the body finally finished. The soul fleeing elsewhere, somewhere.49
“My father died a difficult and terrible death,” said Svetlana. “God grants an easy death only to the just.”50