CHAPTER TWO

Some Soviet officials are evidently worried by the possibility that Mr. Reagan will find himself imprisoned by his philosophy.

—R. W. APPLE JR.1

For equilibrium’s sake, the solid ground of conventional wisdom, circa 1989, holds great attraction. That was the year the captive nations of the USSR’s “Eastern Bloc” began to reconstitute themselves as free-standing states for the first time since the Soviets forced what Winston Churchill famously named the “Iron Curtain” over half of Europe at the end of World War II. Climactically, 1989 was also the year that the Berlin Wall, erected twenty-eight years earlier, with its checkpoints, mines, trip wires, and bunkers, crumbled in a stupendous preview of the pending implosion of the evil empire itself.

Remarkable how the phrase “evil empire,” particularly when framed in the quotation marks of irony, still evokes the indelible image of cartoonish “cowboys” playing at “Star Wars.” Under battering assault by an arsenal of psychological weapons that began with Soviet propaganda and ended with domestic peer pressure, the West was made more uncomfortable by the phrase “evil empire” than by the evil of the empire itself. It still is.

“All Chekists,” Lenin instructed his secret police on December 25, 1919, “have to be on the alert to shoot anyone who doesn’t turn up to work because of ‘Nikola’ [St. Nicholas’s Day].”2 Seventy-two years later, on another December 25, the USSR officially dissolved. It was 1991, and the United States could suddenly lay claim to a shotless final triumph over Lenin’s police state. It was a grand victory that seemed to be due at least partly to the ascendance of a more robust wing of the American Right in the preceding decade. Anti-Communist aspects of U.S. foreign policy had finally repulsed Soviet Communist expansionism, it seemed, thanks in decisive part to the fortunate happenstance of Ronald Reagan. The conventional chorus lists other factors—the deep rot of Communist “planned economies,” the advent of the so-called reformer Gorbachev and his policies of perestroika and glasnost, Poland’s Solidarity movement and the Pope John Paul II effect—but within this same context it seems fair to say Reagan was the singular catalyst, not to mention a lucky break, a political foundling who was only uneasily adopted by the Republican Establishment after he made it to the White House. This was something he accomplished without following (or leaving behind) a line of political bread crumbs. At the same time, however, these seemingly victorious policies (“peace through strength,” support for anti-Soviet forces in the third world, “trust but verify,” Strategic Defense Initiative) promulgated by Cold Warriors far from home proved wholly impotent stateside.

Here, since even before the earliest days of the twentieth century, the riddling, boring penetration of Marxian beliefs—through the influx of true believers from Europe and Russia, through the conversion to true belief of new Marxists at home, and through campaigns of Soviet disinformation and other “active measures”—advanced mainly unchecked. The ideological war abroad, or, more accurately, the anti-ideological war abroad—because, as Robert Conquest reminds us, the West, unlike the USSR, “did not have a universal and exclusively defined mind-set”—was lost on all fronts in the battlespace at home: in the academy, in the media, in the popular culture, in the arts, and in the zeitgeist up and down Main Street and even, or perhaps especially, along capitalism’s main thoroughfare, Wall Street.3 It was as if we opposed an enemy Over There without noticing that great chunks of his ideology had taken root, flourished, and borne collectivist and thus anti-American fruit Over Here.

I’m not just referring to those most radical elements of the early Soviet agenda (the original “Bolshevik plot,” as President Obama might have said) that became Western fixtures even as they were, ironically, reversed under Stalin in the 1930s when they proved to be destabilizing to the young regime. These would include the de-sacralization and legal diminishment of marriage (state boosterism of marriage became apparent in 1936 when wedding rings became available in state-run stores), quick ’n’ easy divorce (curtailed in 1936, largely abolished in 1944), “freedom of abortion” (abolished in 1936), and the elevation of children’s rights to the detriment of parental authority (“respect” for elders became a theme in state-controlled press by 1935).4

Such “antibourgeois” ideas, however, would become the basis of Western manners and mores. Sometimes specifically ascribed to the 1920s writings of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci or the later teachings of the so-called Frankfurt School, other times seen as spillover from the wellspring of early twentieth-century “socialist” and “progressive” political and educational movements, in recent times repackaged as “Alinskyite,” such ideas, rising from the same Marxian wellspring, have flooded, saturated, and finally warped those bastions of Western civilization that conservatives, by definition, feel compelled to defend—just as though those bastions of Western civilization were still bastions. Secure places. Enduring repositories. Eternally unchanged by all the meticulously, continuously documented breaching. In fact, the biggest problem today is with the bastions. They’re not secure, they’re not enduring, and they have been breached.

Broadly, these bastions include Christianity itself, the concept of “patriarchy” and family, and all safeguards of nationhood and traditional culture. My purpose is less to trace the weblike and overlapping origins of the ideas that have undermined these institutions than it is to recognize their common endgame—a place, a world, where these same core Western institutions are no more.

Funny, but wasn’t that the endgame of the defunct USSR, the raison d’être of junk-heaped Marxism-Leninism? That’s a serious question, something to ask while tripping over the strong bonds and common cause shared by America’s enemies and their American friends. The sugarcoater of my enemy, the empathizer with my enemy, the enabler of my enemy, is my … what?

Whatever he is, he’s still with us. Failing to see in Soviet collapse the failure and corruption of the overbearing state, the statist Left has in fact been buoyant, both in spirit and at the polls in these first post-Soviet decades. I don’t mean to suggest that Communist Party members have been winning elections—at least not in the United States. Then again, they don’t have to win to win: The collectivist agenda advances. (It was a positively crowing CPUSA leader Sam Webb who in May 2010 addressed his assembled masses in New York City to take stock of Communist Party gains—all policies or actions initiated by President Barack Obama.5) In fact, David Horowitz argues that “the one consequence of note” of the disappearance of the Soviet bloc has been to reenergize the Left’s assault on the West: “It has lifted the burden of having to defend … an indefensible regime. Because the utopian vision is no longer anchored in the reality of an actually existing socialist state, the left can now indulge its nihilistic agenda without restraint.”6

That sounds good, very neat, but I think something else is going on. Something in the wider society and across the political spectrum is permitting the Communistic Left an untrammeled indulgence: the gross fraud of sundering Communist theory from Communist practice, of detaching support for Communism from any moral responsibility for its crimes, of exempting those same crimes from judgment and punishment. The overlooked fact is that so much of the “utopian vision” that Horowitz refers to is now deeply anchored in the reality of our own actually existing state—and state of mind—and bastions as defended by the political Right. It is the success of the Marx-inspired drive deep into the tissues of the West that is connected to the perplexing vitality of that Marx-inspired agenda.

A clue to the extent of the penetration may be extracted from the seeming oddity that we Americans, as a free people, as Westerners, as a civilization idealizing the autonomy of the individual, never sought to claim “victory,” ideological or otherwise, over superstate Communism at the apparent end of the Cold War. No consensus clicked over signs that an unalloyed U.S.-led triumph over Communism had taken place, that a truly moral victory of freedom over totalitarianism had occurred, that the forces of good—for sure, the forces of better—had at last triumphed over the forces of a demonstrable, nonabstract evil as attested to by all objective examinations of Gulag or Chekist or famine or purge history.

Was this hollow reaction due to the “crisis of confidence” we hear about, that “PC”-inculcated failure to believe in the worth of the West? I used to think exactly that and no more, that the postmodern West, conned past a point of sheepish self-effacement to wallow, gratefully, in a slough of self-loathing, no longer saw anything of value in itself and was thus no longer able to take pride in or even succor at the demise of its nemesis. After all, who’s to say the Western system is qualitatively better than any other?

However, the crisis itself doesn’t tell the whole story. That is, recognizing the disease isn’t the same as identifying its cause, how and when it was contracted, its full impact, or the patient’s prognosis. After all, there comes a point at which the crisis has passed—even a crisis of confidence—and then what? Has that point come and gone? When I look at the out-and-out antagonism the West directs toward its own foundational pillars, I see not a West that simply fails to appreciate itself anymore, but rather a West that isn’t itself anymore.

This concept offers another perspective from which to see the fact that even as the walls of Communism came tumbling down in the final decade of the twentieth century, the official American tone was noticeably reticent; there was almost an air of embarrassment over witnessing the USSR at such a colossal disadvantage. This tortured psychological condition was not unlike “the embarrassment widely felt in some American circles about possession of the atom bomb,” as Cold War historian Adam Ulam wrote in 1972. Ulam was describing the immediate aftermath of World War II when, as he put it, some people had “the feeling that somehow it was not fair for the U.S. to enjoy a monopoly of this weapon” (emphasis added).7 Of course, due to the success of a vast, Soviet-directed conspiracy, that monopoly didn’t last more than the four years between the U.S. atomic test in 1945 and the USSR atomic test in 1949. By 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for their roles in the conspiracy, triggering an open-ended argument over their culpability that became ingrained in the American psyche to a point where even archival documentation of their guilt fails to fill in the worn cultural groove entirely. Meanwhile, the argument went, the Russians would have gotten the bomb by themselves eventually, so what’s the difference?

The question mark here masks a complete lack of comprehension when it comes to discerning any possible distinction between nuclear-enhanced Gulag might and nuclear-enhanced constitutional rights. Instead, the question mark here perversely signals the train of thought’s terminus in the brick wall of “moral equivalence.”

What’s the difference? USSR, USA, they’re both big bullies.

The successful Soviet atomic test in 1949 thoroughly unnerved Americans, generating jitters over international Communist aggression and new fears of domestic Communist penetration that would be investigated most sensationally, but by no means uniquely, by Senator Joseph McCarthy beginning in 1950. It also had tangibly cataclysmic results. On April 5, 1951, Judge Irving R. Kaufman stated, in sentencing the Rosenbergs to death, that the scientific consensus of the day was that the theft of atomic secrets in the 1940s accelerated the development of a Soviet atomic bomb by several years. This accelerated Soviet acquisition of atomic capability, Kaufman continued, “caused the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.”8 It was Kaufman’s conclusion that the treachery of these American Communists and their accomplices had directly led to the 1950 outbreak of the Korean War.

Today, archival evidence, unearthed by researchers in Russia and released in the United States, proves Judge Kaufman to have been correct. “Absent an atomic bomb, Stalin would not have unleashed Pyongyang’s army to conquer the entire Korean peninsula,” Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, authors of The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors, concluded in 2000. “Confident that his possession of atomic weapons neutralized America’s strategic advantage, Stalin was emboldened to unleash war in Korea in 1950,” John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, authors of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, wrote in 2009. These latter authors further contended that Soviet espionage, which ended up crippling America’s ability to read Soviet military communications, also ensured that the invasion of South Korea was a surprise “for which American forces were unprepared.”9

I’m guessing this revelation—that Soviet possession of an atomic bomb in 1949, due to the treachery of American Communists, helped precipitate the Korean War in 1950—is new to many readers, particularly those who have long been taught to believe that Rosenberg guilt, even when ultimately if reluctantly acknowledged, was largely a matter of “personal conscience” or political conviction, and not in any way an issue of national security. This is the typical response to this day. For example, even the landmark work The Haunted Wood, the 1999 book by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev that amasses voluminous evidence of American treason on Moscow’s behalf during the New Deal (1930s) and war years (1940s), ultimately assesses this same evidence in the most personal terms: namely, the impact of this concerted and aggressive campaign of theft and subversion on the agents themselves. Their “enduring legacy,” the authors sum up in their final line, “remains one of inglorious constancy to a cruel and discredited cause.”10 Such minimization of the link between personal cause and global effect is typical, even among the greatest scholars of Soviet espionage. There has been scant attempt, to continue with the Rosenberg example, to connect their treachery with its impact: to connect the theft of nuclear technology with 36,940 Americans killed, 91,134 wounded, and 8,176 still missing in action in a war that claimed at least two million civilian lives on both sides.11

Instead, we look back on an exhausting struggle over whether such Communist penetration existed in the first place. Communist penetration existed—the historical record amply and redundantly confirms this—but endless wrangling even today wards off a comprehensive reckoning of the impact of that penetration. Undoubtedly, this is the purpose of some of the wranglers. Like a magic word denoting an atavistic taboo, the term “McCarthyism,” used as an epithet, still stymies debate, while the nagging phrase “looking for a Communist under every bed” still dampens the blazing import of declassified revelations from the archives. The fact that there were hidden Communists practically everywhere, and probably under the bed, too, remains stuck in the limbo between old, discredited theories, and new, confirmed realities. Somehow, we never get around to judging the effects, the impact of Communism itself, whether that impact is something as concrete as a body count or something as vaporous as a sensibility. That’s why after seventy years of diligently chronicled crime, cataloged, sourced, witnessed, and experienced (the luminous names of Elinor Lipper, David Dallin, Victor Kravchenko, and, of course, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spring to mind, as well as Robert Conquest), the recent confirmations of guilt often show up as mere technicalities, relegated to footnotes, small type, and back pages. The reckoning eludes us.

So it still wasn’t fair, this time in 1989, to bear exacting witness to the unraveling of seven-plus decades of Communist horror, terror, perversion, and epochal loss—and especially not from the fat and happy vantage point of the “Reagan 1980s.” Better to extend to the Soviet Union the official courtesy of not acknowledging, not noticing, the systemically rotten reasons for Communist decay, as though nothing more significant were occurring on the world stage than a colossal wardrobe malfunction. Writing in April 1991, eight months before the USSR’s official dissolution, New York Times columnist William Safire noted, “We are so careful to avoid the appearance of triumphalism—with Mr. Bush murmuring his twin mantras of ‘mustn’t gloat’ and ‘mustn’t get sucked in’—that we risk watching the triumph of capitalism over Communism turn into a series of internal disasters posing external dangers.”12

Oh, right. That would have been George H. W. Bush presiding. Funny how the mind’s eye sometimes sees Reagan in the Oval Office for these events. No, it was Bush père, all right, and he, as Leader of the Free World, quickly set the scrupulously nonjudgmental and even supplicating tone that marks the era. This began with Bush’s very first post–Berlin Wall conference with Mikhail Gorbachev, the last dictator—or, as they were more tastefully titled, the last “general secretary”—of the USSR.

Two decades after the historic Bush-Gorbachev shipboard get-together off the island-state of Malta, the transcripts released by the Gorbachev Foundation (the U.S. record, shockingly, remains classified at the George H. W. Bush Library in Texas13) make for revealing, if also startling reading. If you didn’t know better, you might think the United States had just lost a war or something.

“I hope you have noticed that while the changes in Eastern Europe have been going on, the United States has not engaged in condescending statements aimed at damaging the Soviet Union,” Bush was quick to point out in that first meeting with Gorbachev aboard the Soviet cruise ship Maxim Gorky. Indeed, in opening remarks, Bush offered Gorbachev an array of economic carrots and no sticks—i.e., no quid pro quo. Such carrots included Most Favored Nation status and eased access to Western credit. That wasn’t all. Bush then stressed America’s desire to continue to safeguard Soviet prestige: “We have attempted to construct our proposals in a way that does not give the impression that America is ‘saving’ the Soviet Union. We are not talking about a plan of assistance but about a plan for cooperation.”14

The extent of this “cooperation” to keep the USSR intact would become publicly embarrassing for Bush when in August 1991 in Kiev, Ukraine, he gave a speech panning “suicidal nationalism” and urging the Soviet “republic” not to vote itself independent of the Moscow monolith. In Safire’s words, this became immortalized as the “Chicken Kiev speech.” In 2004, the columnist would reveal that Bush had not spoken to him since.15

Bush, of course, saw—or wanted to see, or wanted the world to see—Gorbachev as a “reformer” he could work with. He staked his presidency on it, as national security expert Angelo Codevilla has noted, and thus acted to preserve the status quo, i.e., Gorbachev’s power.16 The context of Soviet decline—the blood, the sweat, the fear-stained annals of Communist history—all of that was just some extraneous “vision-thing.” As far as this forty-first president of the United States was concerned, the apparent U.S.–USSR endgame was no more significant than a Toyota-Ford contest: Ford had taken a big hit, and Toyota “mustn’t gloat” while they both set out together to expand market share. This approach to the crisis in totalitarianism depended on continuity in all things, and that included maintaining the official silence that left the millions killed and ruined by Communists in open-ended and unmarked anonymity.

Thus it is that in reading the 1989 Malta transcripts we glimpse an eager-to-please Bush encountering a downright insolent Gorbachev. Think of it. The Soviet dictatorship is foundering on top of a “planned economy” in ruins even as its captive nations are breaking away. Incredibly, Gorbachev proceeds to admonish Bush about “the export of American values” and “Western values.” (This was the same point of pique Gorbachev had raised a day earlier in a meeting at the Vatican with Pope John Paul II.17) Even more incredibly, Bush takes it. In what is described as a private, one-on-one session with Bush, Gorbachev said, “I cannot accept it when some American politicians say that the process of overcoming the split in Europe—should be based on Western values.”18

I cannot accept it? Bear in mind that what Gorbachev is calling “the split in Europe” is the apparent breakaway of nations ruined by Communism, territories seized nearly a half century earlier by the USSR, as British historian Gregor Dallas has pointed out, exactly according to the brutish division of Europe as laid out in the secret protocol of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact—sans Nazis.19 Gorbachev “cannot accept” that such societies, at that moment deep in death throes, should be “split” from Moscow and saved by “Western,” i.e., free-market, freedom-based principles. Nonetheless, he would soon find a way to accept the $45 billion in aid that would be gushing his way, a massive flow of largesse created by those same robust Western values.20 It was all “take” and no “give,” and might well have prompted Lenin himself to posit his trademark power question: “Who—whom?” Who had prevailed over whom?

Gorbachev went on to push a related point. “It seems that earlier we were blamed for the ‘export of revolution,’ and now they speak about the export of American values. I believe this goes against the spirit of today’s changes.”21

Here, just at the precise historical date when what you might call the consumer nations of the Eastern Bloc appeared to be returning all Communist imports to sender—ideology, police state, poverty, secrecy—Gorbachev was still pressing ahead with a corollary of “moral equivalence”: If the Soviets “were blamed” for exporting “revolution” (police state), then the Americans were equally at fault for exporting “American values” (rule of law). It was as though dictatorship and constitutional government were interchangeable, a fallacy that Gorbachev (b. 1931), a blinkered, censored, molded creation of the Soviet state narrative, had no reason to question.

Yes, the “visionary reformer” gloss on “Gorby” was thin from the start. As far back as November 1985, six months after Gorbachev “took” office, The New York Times reported, almost incredulously, on Gorbachev’s apparent internalization of Soviet disinformation about the United States. It was during the run-up to Gorbachev’s first meeting with Ronald Reagan in Geneva, and the paper quoted unnamed diplomats noting how closely Gorbachev’s conversation echoed Pravda editorials. One added, “There may be an element of posturing and calculated propaganda, but all the evidence suggests that the man sincerely believes these things” (emphasis added).

Such evidence includes this nugget: “The diplomats said Mr. Gorbachev, who was more combative and argumentative than he had been in previous meetings with Americans, challenged almost every statement made by [Secretary of State George Shultz] about the United States. They said, for example, that he refused to accept Mr. Shultz’s depiction of the United States as a source of military hardware and other aid to the Soviet Union in World War II, belittling the lend-lease program”22 (emphasis added).

When I read this, I knew from long-ago history classes and reading ever since that Gorbachev was plain dead wrong (brainwashed himself) and/or flat-out lying (brainwashing others). George Shultz’s “depiction” of Uncle Sam as “a wartime supplier” to the USSR was a fact. It was also a gross if not also grotesque understatement. What’s known as Lend-Lease, now dimly recalled (usually in association with Britain’s war effort and rarely as the program FDR sold to Congress as a means to keep America out of the Second World War23), was crucial to the Soviet Union’s World War II victory over Hitler’s Germany.

But did I know that FDR gave Lend-Lease aid to Russia a priority that superseded all Allied military needs—including American military needs?

No.

Did I know that the Lend-Lease program provided much more than war supplies to the USSR—that massive lots of postwar supplies (which quickly became Soviet Cold War supplies) were thrown in with the deluxe deal?

No.

Did I know that such supplies also included the materials that go into making an atomic bomb—chemicals, metals, minerals up to and including uranium?

Again, no. Why were these salient details not included in the standard narratives? This question became as intriguing as the lost record itself, which exists, or rather languishes, on a dust heap of history all its own.

“After Hitler invaded the USSR in June [1941], U.S. war supplies flowed to the Soviet Union as well [as Britain], despite American hostility to communism,” says the one single sentence on the subject of Lend-Lease to Russia in the current AP U.S. history textbook—the one concept Americans are ever expected to know on the subject. I’m going to leave aside, just for the moment, that supposed “American hostility to communism,” a problematic statement given the crippling extent to which we know without doubt that all echelons of the United States government were riddled with Moscow-loyal agents and fellow travelers—and when I say “all echelons,” I mean all echelons, something I’ll be getting to.

War supplies didn’t just “flow” to the Soviet Union, they flooded it, with over half a million trucks and jeeps, nearly $1 billion worth (1940s dollars) of ordnance and ammunition, thousands of fighter aircraft, bombers, and tanks, 13 million pairs of winter boots, 1.7 million tons of petroleum products, a merchant fleet, 1,000 steam locomotives, 581 naval vessels including minesweepers, landing craft, submarine chasers, frigates, torpedo boats, floating dry docks, pontoon barges, river tugs, and a light cruiser.24 There were also icebreakers, which were essential to keep the northernmost ports of the Gulag Archipelago supplied with fresh slaves, another “lost” fact.25 American Lend-Lease didn’t just keep the Soviet police state humming along internally, either. As Nikita Khrushchev would say to Life magazine in 1970 of those half a million trucks and jeeps, “Just imagine how we would have advanced from Stalingrad to Berlin without them!”26

OK, I’m game. Let’s imagine. What Khrushchev seems to have been saying is that without all those American wheels, the Soviets wouldn’t have been able to advance the roughly 1,400 miles from Stalingrad to Berlin, occupying the nations of Eastern Europe in between for the next four and a half decades.

Clearly, on challenging Shultz about Lend-Lease, Gorbachev should have had his knuckles rapped, diplomatically speaking, what with all the made-in-USA munitions stockpiles, diesel engines, entire prefab factories, and hydroelectric plants that he must have tripped over as a youngster in the postwar Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands of patents—literally, as estimated by a congressional committee27—made their way to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease, including secret military blueprints (more on that below) and, of course, those atomic research goodies. And I’m barely scraping the surface of the Soviet Lend-Lease catalog, which, as noted above, also included plenty of nonmilitary supplies: for example, a tire plant, an oil refinery, an unstated number of pipe-fabricating works, nearly one million miles of copper wire (that would remain on a twenty-acre lot in Westchester County until shipment to the USSR near the very end of the war), tens of millions of dollars’ worth of switchboard panels and parts, lathes and power tools for metal working, machinery for textiles, woodworking, and typesetting, cranes, hoists, derricks, elevators, air compressors, coal cutters, and rock drills, not to mention $152 million in women’s “dress goods,” 18.4 million pounds of writing paper, and assorted cigarette cases, compacts, jeweled watches, lipstick, liquor, ten bathtubs, two pianos, and, intriguingly, one tobacco pipe. As George Kennan would write, understating, at the war’s endgame, there was “no adequate justification for continuing a program of lavish and almost indiscriminate aid to the Soviet Union at a time when there was increasing reason to doubt whether her purposes in Eastern Europe, aside from the defeat of Germany, would be ones which we Americans could approve and sponsor.”28

Was the continuous Lend-Lease supply line to Soviet Russia, then, a case of government inertia, or was there some other justification worth ferreting out from our lost history? Could it have had anything to do with the curious priority the U.S. government attached to Soviet Lend-Lease superseding other Allied and even American military needs? (As for American civilian needs, the 217,660,666 pounds of butter shipped to the USSR during a time of strict stateside rationing offers a quick read on U.S. government priorities.29) Here, for example, from orders issued on January 1, 1943, to Maj. George Racey Jordan, a supervisory “expediter” of Soviet Lend-Lease aid who was stationed at the Great Falls, Montana, hub of the Soviet pipeline, is what that priority looked like in black and white:

1. The President has directed that “airplanes be delivered in accordance with protocol schedules by the most expeditious means.” To implement these directives, the modification, equipment and movement of Russian planes have been given first priority, even over planes for U.S. Army Air Forces [emphasis added].30

Jordan would tell Congress in December 1949 that he kept this presidential directive on his person to show presumably incredulous fellow servicemen, such as the U.S. Air Force colonel who, Jordan notes in his essential 1952 memoir of Lend-Lease, From Major Jordan’s Diaries, was flummoxed when Jordan informed him that his mission would be held up due to Soviet “first priority.” “He went around muttering, ‘First priority! I’ll be damned.’ He asked me whether many Air Force pilots knew about this. I told him that they found out about it when they hit Great Falls and tried to enter the [Russian] Pipeline” (emphasis in original).31

What does it mean that FDR gave Soviet supply this singular urgency as soon as it was politically feasible following Nazi Germany’s invasion of Soviet Russia on June 22, 1941?

The search for answers to this admittedly offbeat question is not a comforting exercise. Items such as the following about the rush of military supplies to the USSR during the fall of 1941 start popping up. Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times that this yeoman supply effort to Moscow tipped the balance for Stalin “during that first desperate winter”—but at what cost? As Johnson notes, such supplies “included 200 modern fighter aircraft, intended originally for Britain’s highly vulnerable base in Singapore, which had virtually no modern fighters at all. The diversion of these aircraft (plus tanks) to Russia sealed the fate of Singapore.”32

Singapore, which would fall on February 15, 1942, a giant morale crusher, was in the Pacific. From the start, the Pacific War didn’t count. From the start, the Soviet war counted more.

Even after December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor?

Yes.

Even after December 8, when Japan attacked 151,000 Americans and Filipinos stationed in the U.S. protectorate of the Philippines?33

Yes. Why?

On December 10, 1941, eighty-six Japanese bombers attacked and sank the British battleship Prince of Wales and battle cruiser Repulse north of Singapore. This was a stunning disaster costing the lives of more than eight hundred British sailors, including Admiral Sir Tom Phillips, the highest Allied officer to die in action during the war. As Churchill’s physician and biographer Lord Moran noted on more than one occasion, these appalling losses always haunted Churchill, who had insisted on this mission.34 The warships had no air cover.

Of course, Russia did. Remember the two hundred modern fighters Paul Johnson noted were diverted from Singapore to the USSR? “The diversion of these aircraft (plus tanks) … sealed the fate of Singapore,” he writes, the implication being such air support would have been crucial to a successful effort to repulse or even forestall the Japanese onslaught on Singapore. “Thus,” Johnson concludes, “by one of the great ironies of history, Churchill, the last major British imperialist, may have sacrificed a liberal empire in order to preserve a totalitarian one.”35 When Singapore fell to the Japanese on February 15, 1942, more than one hundred thousand British forces surrendered. This haunted Churchill, too.

Washington, meanwhile, only had eyes for Moscow. “The need to meet monthly protocol schedules and shipping dates took precedence over everything else,” notes George C. Herring in his 1973 history of Soviet Lend-Lease. As no-strings, zero-interest supplies earmarked for Moscow became available, Herring continues, “they were set aside for the Russians under absolute priority over the competing demands of Britain and the United States.” No military misgivings based on national interests slowed the gears of war production for the Soviet Union as ordered by FDR. Again, quoting Herring, “He [FDR] left no doubt of the importance he attached to aid to Russia. ‘I would go out and take the stuff off the shelves of the stores,’ he told [Treasury Secretary Henry] Morgenthau on March 11, 1942, ‘and pay them any price necessary, and put it in a truck and rush it to the boat … Nothing would be worse than to have the Russians collapse.’”36

Nothing would be worse? Not even, for example, the collapse of those 151,000 American and Filipino troops who, at this touching moment of solicitude in the Oval Office for the Red Army, had just begun their fourth month of unreinforced, unsupplied, death-defying resistance to a massive, concentrated Japanese assault on Bataan and Corregidor? It just happens that also on March 11, 1942, under Roosevelt’s order, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was attempting to slip through the Japanese blockade and leave the American island protectorate to take up command of the Southwest Pacific in Australia. By Morgenthau’s account, however, Roosevelt’s thoughts were still elsewhere: “I would rather lose New Zealand, Australia or anything else than have the Russian front collapse.”37

Why? What accounts for this unusual level of anxiety? And why does it matter now? To take the last question first, it matters now because FDR is included among the top American presidents every time a newspaper or university or blue-ribbon committee assembles “experts” to vote; and because there are in FDR’s solicitude clues to important lessons we’ve never learned about ourselves as a nation. Quite unexpectedly, it turns out, the search for the lost history of American betrayal takes an unexpected detour through World War II. There is something in what I can now only think of as Roosevelt’s “Soviet First” policy—Lend-Lease was just the beginning—that I believe offers a key to understanding much that has always puzzled me about subsequent American history. It’s not hindsight alone that brings this into focus now, but rather a new, archivally informed hindsight. In other words, the evidence gleaned from archives in Moscow and Washington, which opened after the USSR dissolved in 1991, explains more than Cold War secrets. I believe it enables us to see into the murky beginnings of cultural relativism and other conditions that mark us to this day.

“They were the only Americans in the world at this time who were fighting the enemy, yet the flood of weapons from their country’s arsenals was being rushed to every other battle front but theirs.” So wrote Col. Warren J. Clear, an intelligence officer under MacArthur at Bataan.38 In his 1962 book Reminiscences, Gen. Douglas MacArthur revealed details about the crisis on the Philippines unknown to the American public for the two decades since it took place:

Although Admiral King felt the fleet did not have sufficient resources to proceed to Manila, it was my impression that our Navy deprecated its own strength and might well have cut through to relieve our hard-pressed forces. The bulk of the Jap Navy was headed south to seize Borneo, Malaya, and Indo-China. American carriers having escaped destruction at Pearl Harbor could have brought planes to the Philippines. The Navy fought the next two years and had great victories without any new ships.

But a top-level decision had long before been reached that the Atlantic war came first, no matter what the cost in the Far East. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, in a Washington conference after the attack on Pearl Harbor, reaffirmed a policy to concentrate first on the defeat of Germany … Unfortunately, I was not informed of any of these vital conferences and believed that a brave effort at relief was in the making.39

As MacArthur only later found out—“truth,” John Hersey wrote, came in “mean little doses”40—the Allied strategy focused on dispatching Nazi Germany, which resulted in the “Soviet First” policy. Defeating Japan could wait. So, too, it seemed, could MacArthur’s forces. They would fight the Japanese on the Philippines from December 8, 1941—a day that does not “live in infamy” or really anything else in our collective memory—until their surrender six terrible months later. Hitler’s Germany simply had to be stopped before it destroyed Stalin’s Russia—or is it that Stalin’s Russia had to be saved before Hitler’s Germany destroyed it?—and at any cost, including those 151,000 troops in the Pacific.

Then there were the catastrophic Allied losses along the North Atlantic shipping supply route to the USSR. Washington may have determined that it was too dangerous to supply Americans and Filipinos in the Philippines, but no losses were too high to stop supplying the USSR. And were they ever high. In July 1942, for example, only eleven out of thirty-five merchant ships in the supply convoy to Murmansk known as PQ-17 survived unceasing German attacks.41

Could a supply effort to MacArthur have possibly cost more in men and matériel? Is there something wrong, really wrong, with this picture as drawn by the intelligence officer and the general—something that evades the frame of national memory? I realize these questions take shape outside the scope and boundary of popular history—the bestselling books, the moist-eyed reminiscences, the landmark photographs, the Oscar-winning movies, the acclaimed TV miniseries—all of which fuel the residual glow around American involvement in World War II. Even today, Americans recall with practically eyewitness certitude a war narrative that unspools with the attack on Pearl Harbor, somehow overlaps the Battle of Britain (which ended in 1940), and climaxes with D-day. Images such as the flag raising at Iwo Jima, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, and the kiss in Times Square pop up to disconnected but powerful effect.

My questions make me uneasy even as I ask them, even as I know at least some of the answers. My quandary is not unlike that of a mystery writer. The difference is I’m trying to lay a trail of clues that identify not just an unnoticed criminal but an unnoticed crime. An unimagined crime. An unnoticed, unimagined crime of Communist penetration and therefore influence, not only on the course of American postwar policy—a story we grasp, if only incompletely, as the notorious “betrayal at Yalta” that left Eastern Europe to Soviet designs, circa 1945—but also on the formation of America’s shining moment on the world stage. I refer to World War II, even now our talisman of a moral, mighty past unbowed by postmodern doubt and multicultural division.

I might as well begin by saying we don’t know the half of it, which, in an odd way, takes some of the sting out of Gorbachev’s Lend-Lease lie. That is, we have our own narrative of gross omission, and it turns out to be just as factually challenged as his. Whether Gorbachev disbelieved in the indisputable fact of Lend-Lease (testament to the powers of Soviet propaganda to twist even its own dictators), or simply wanted the West to disbelieve in it (testament to the Soviet resolve to spread disinformation whenever and wherever possible), or even both at the same time, history as a record of real events itself long ago disappeared from view in Communist Russia. It was either imprisoned, literally, in the shackled witness of millions of prisoners in the Gulag Archipelago, or it was hidden in the resulting and no less terrifying Gulag of the furtive, fearful mind. Or, more prosaically, it was simply locked away in secret state files. History became verboten when Soviet Man was compelled to sacrifice truth to fear.

So what is our excuse? If Soviet overlords brutally and forcibly locked the truth and the truth tellers away, we in the West freely blind ourselves to facts while ignoring or deriding our truth tellers out of existence.

Why?

One answer is that it is easier to muffle truth than act on it, definitely more pleasant. Better to inhabit a faux-sophisticated atmosphere free of Koestler’s “Cassandra cries,” where, in the luxe-y limbo of “moral equivalence,” no one had to do anything heroic, or plan or even think anything confrontationally challenging. So much easier to stifle the occasional and always tiresome voice of dissent. In this way, the default position of moral equivalence became the orthodoxy of twentieth-century elites, driving editorials, political platforms, social activism, and even pop culture. Take the espionage fiction of British author John le Carré, which appeared periodically throughout the Cold War beginning in 1961. Le Carré’s fiction, which includes such titles as The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, did two things. First, it painted the Cold War divide between West and East from a palette of “nuanced” “shades of gray,” depicting an unresolved, unresolvable battlescape of tonal shadows. This ideological morass “blurred” any and all distinctions between the two sides, even, remarkably, the fact that the Cheka and its spawn, including the KGB, were central to the conduct of Soviet foreign policy, as well as to running the one-party state, in ways Western intelligence organizations never were and couldn’t be.42 Second, these books reliably hit Western bestseller lists. Tastefully cynical and conveniently amoral, the le Carréllian message was: East, West, Communism, capitalism, mirror images, no difference. The impact of this message was huge. I still remember a sinking feeling when I saw Senator Pat “Leaky” Leahy boarding a flight out of Washington, D.C., clutching le Carré’s A Perfect Spy. The 1986 book is about a double agent who languishes in exquisite torment, living a tissue of lies and all that, not knowing one side from the other anymore. At the time, Leahy was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Just a few years later at Malta, Gorbachev gave voice to this same familiar fiction. “Some are beginning to speak about the ‘Bush doctrine,’ that is replacing the ‘Brezhnev doctrine,’ Gorbachev declared in 1989.”43 The implication was, this was equally bad: that is, if the Brezhnev doctrine was out, the so-called Bush doctrine should be out, too. George H. W. Bush failed to disagree. The forty-first American president’s response was to reassure Gorbachev he would not be jumping “up onto the [Berlin] Wall” to hasten German reunification.

To which Gorbachev replied, “Well, jumping on the Wall is not a good activity for a president.”

Transcript: “Laughter.”44

In a later Malta session, Gorbachev again returned to this pet Soviet peeve: “I am under the impression that U.S. leaders are now quite actively advancing the idea of conquering the division of Europe on the basis of ‘Western values.’”45

Again, by “the division of Europe” Gorbachev meant the Soviet-usurped sovereignty of about one dozen nation-states. “Conquering” that “division” is Politburo-speak for introducing rule of law, freedom of speech, and other “Western values” in place of rule by threat and thugocracy.

Gorbachev continued, “If this premise is not solely for propaganda purposes, and they are intending to make it the basis for practical policy, then I will say bluntly that they are committing many follies. At one time in the West there was anxiety that the Soviet Union was planning to export revolution. But the aim of exporting ‘Western values’ sounds similar.”

Soviet revolution (police state) vs. Western values (Bill of Rights): What’s the diff?

The phrase “Western values” popped up in the American briefing books for Malta, so maybe Gorbachev’s attack triggered something in the president’s cranial nooks. Bush said, “What are Western values? They are, if you will, free speech, openness, lively debates. In the economic realm—stimulus for progress, a free market. These values are not something new, or of the moment … They unite the West. We welcome changes in [the USSR and Eastern Europe] but by no means set them against Western values.”

Mild, but something at least. The Soviet ruler, however, was not assuaged. In fact, what already feels like heat on the transcript page seems to intensify. Gorbachev hotly interjected a question from his chief Marxist-Leninist theorist: “A. N. Yakovlev is asking: Why are democracy, openness, [free] market ‘Western values’”?

As with Gorbachev and his reflexive denial of Lend-Lease, it’s quite likely that Politburo member Yakovlev—a collective-farm boy who became a Marxist-Leninist ideologist and propagandist, head of the Communist Party propaganda department, and, later, Central Committee secretary of ideological matters—didn’t know, couldn’t know, the correct answer. It’s possible that as a Communist propagandist he was ill equipped to trace the history of liberty in the Western world as the precious legacy of Greece and Rome, of Judaism and Christianity. Because Yakovlev, post Gorbachev, would later work to excavate the hidden toll of Soviet state crime and human suffering (atonement?), would that it were possible to interview him about this historic exchange; he died in 2005. In 1989, however, there was his question, tossing George H. W. Bush a golden educational, if not also political, softball.

Did the American president pull out a well-worn pocket edition of the Declaration of Independence and begin reading aloud?

When, Gorby, in the course of human events …

Or tell the Soviets the story of the English barons who in 1215 instituted rule of law by forcing the Magna Carta on tyrannical King John?

Many centuries ago, Comrade Yakovlev, in a place called Runnymede …

None of the above, naturally. Instead:

BUSH: It was not always that way. You personally created a start for these changes directed toward democracy and openness. Today it is really much clearer than it was, say, 20 years ago that we share these values with you.

GORBACHEV: There is no point in entering into propaganda battles.

YAKOVLEV: When you insist on “Western values,” then “Eastern values” unavoidably appear, and “Southern values” …

GORBACHEV: Exactly. And when that happens, ideological confrontations flare up again.

BUSH: I understand and I agree. Let us try to avoid careless words and talk more about the content of these values. From the bottom of our hearts we welcome the changes that are taking place [emphasis added].

Those “careless words” Bush abandoned so readily stood for precise and precious facts—the truth. In the face of conflict—a Commie hissy fit—the president of the United States negotiated away that truth in exchange for Moscow’s false narrative.

From the bottom of our hearts, Bush surrendered the core principles that distinguished the American republic from the “union” (vise) of “Soviet” “socialist” ones (dictatorships). In other words, Bush there and then gave away the store. In this first meeting of wasted East and robust West since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bush conceded to Gorbachev the right to set all parameters of discussion, to control the language itself, and, therefore, crucial historical and political understandings of events. Of course, to be fair, Bush was merely sealing the deal, offering yet another extension of the legitimacy with which the United States had endowed the criminal Communist enterprise since official relations began. Gorbachev had won again. He replied:

That is very important. You see, as I said, the most important thing is that the changes lead to greater openness even in our relations with each other. We are beginning to become organically integrated, freeing ourselves from everything that divided us. What will this be called in the final analysis? I think it is a new level of relations. For that reason, for my part, I support your proposal; let us not conduct the discussion at the levels of the Church. In history this has always led to religious wars [emphasis added].

Big difference: The tragedy of religious wars within “the Church” was that all combatants worshipped the same deity. This is not the case with Communism and the West. Communism enshrines the state. The West, according to its central principles, protects the rights of the individual. There is nothing that the West—or at least the individual—gains by blurring this distinction in order to worship at a phony altar with dictators.

None of this mattered to George H. W. Bush. The day after the Malta meeting, Bush channeled his “new” U.S.-USSR understanding in an address at NATO headquarters in Brussels. He duly emphasized that “the end to the unnatural division of Europe and Germany” should “proceed in accordance with and be based upon the values that are becoming universal ideals.”46 There was no talk, no mention, of “Western values.”

In the end, Gorbachev would fail to retain Soviet power; nonetheless, he had successfully averted a crucial “Western” victory over the seven-decade-long ideological catastrophe the USSR had inflicted on the whole world, both free and unfree.

Did “universal” values fare well in the new, post-Soviet day? In Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press 2012 survey, Russia is ranked “not free.” Ranked 172 out 197, Russia shares the bottom tier with Saudi Arabia, China, and Iran, trailing Pakistan and Sudan.47 (“Not safe” is another apt designation, since fifty-three journalists have been killed in Russia since 1992.48) Meanwhile, “Religious freedom conditions in Russia continue to deteriorate,” said the 2012 annual report of the Commission on International Religious Freedom, which returned Russia to its “watch list” in 2009.49 As for monitored Russian elections, such as the 2008 presidential election, they are increasingly deemed unfree and unfair.50 Human rights? The Gulag network of prison camps has not reopened, but two dozen political prisoners are under lock and key, writes Vladimir Bukovsky, who also has called attention to the attempted resurrection in Russia of psychiatric hospitals as tools of political repression.51 In the spring of 2012, opposition activists presented a list of thirty-nine “political prisoners.”52 Such depredations are widely noted, but merely clucked over at international gatherings.53 Maybe all those Russian state-owned gas and oil assets pipelining into Europe have a gagging effect.

In answer to the 64,000-ruble question—“What went wrong?”—Bukovsky cites the failure to render judgment on the Soviet system on its dissolution: “We were given a chance to win in 1991. To do it we needed a Nuremberg trial, but not a trial of people. In a country like the Soviet Union, if you tried to find all the guilty, you would end up with 19 million people, and who needs another Gulag? This isn’t about punishing individuals. It’s about judging the system.”54

As the transcript reveals, Bush of Malta wasn’t about to judge or even acknowledge “the system.” Ultimately, neither was Boris Yeltsin, who became the first president of the new Russia. But Yeltsin’s reasons, according to Bukovsky, were different from those of George Bush. Yeltsin actually enabled Bukovsky to help prepare a court case against Communism. Looking back on the period he spent digging around and extracting documents from those Soviet archives to which he was granted access, Bukovsky writes:

I spent a lot of time trying to persuade the Yeltsin government to conduct such a trial. Yeltsin finally said, “No.” The reason he had to say no was the enormous pressure he felt from the West not to have such a trial. I’ve seen the cables he received from all over the world, mostly from Russian embassies, explaining that local politicians and governments were against any trials or disclosure of crimes of opening of archives. Finally Yeltsin just gave in [emphasis added].55

How bizarre: the enormous pressure Yeltsin felt from the West? After witnessing the theater of appeasement Bush staged at Malta, it’s hard to be entirely surprised. Still, it does remain baffling, particularly without preparatory context. The Free World, as I began this chapter arguing, had every reason to put Communism on trial in some way: to vindicate and showcase the free-market system, to justify treasury-draining military and related expenditures throughout the Cold War, to memorialize the tens of millions of people lost to Communism’s inhumanity. “Never again,” however, became the vow never taken. Why?

Once again, the West as we think of it just isn’t the West as it is. Bukovsky explains:

Because of the documents I recovered [in Soviet archives], we now understand why the West was so against putting the communist system on trial. It is not only that the West was infiltrated by the Soviets much deeper than we ever thought, but also that there was ideological collaboration between left-wing parties in the West and Soviet Union. This ideological collaboration ran very deep [emphasis added].

Deeper Soviet infiltration and deeper Western ideological collaboration made all the difference. On a pop cultural level, what Bukovsky describes sounds more like the premise of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the sci-fi cult classic about the secret infiltration and subversion of an entire town via alien “pods,” than any Cold War history or thriller I can think of. The horror of Body Snatchers stems from the pod-people’s surface normalcy, which masks their transformation within. Increasingly, they are on or of the Other Side. Seeing this story as a metaphor for the eroding West, we might see that with so many “pod-people,” declaring victory over the Soviet Union became impossible. How could a society, a people, a civilization have been “turned”? Apathy has made the answer elusive—and could that be another effect of the compromised condition? It would certainly explain our failure as a society to pass judgment on the crimes of Communism, which, as tabulated in the seminal 1999 work The Black Book of Communism, destroyed some one hundred million lives. Ditto for our failures to pass judgment more generally on the array of Marx-inspired assaults and threats against bedrock, traditional society. These include assaults on social pillars (“traditional” marriage, “traditional” family) and constitutional principles (individual liberty). These gigantic manifestations of nonjudgmentalism, a kind of society-wide suspension of moral acting that is crucial to the spread, by the way, of cultural relativism, are the distinctive social phenomena of our time.

All of which makes Nuremberg an extremely ironic example for Bukovsky to have cited as the judgmental model of choice. Indeed, it was at this international tribunal, a veritable judicial Camelot, so the annals do tell, that Western nonjudgmentalism was publicly and officially institutionalized, a form of justice so very blind that crimes (on all sides) that should have been weighed impartially went unseen altogether, subsequently vanishing from our own historical context. Even to participate in these trials, the Western Allies had to overlook Stalin’s crimes and pretend they had not taken place within the timeline of the war whose very outbreak was precipitated by the infamous 1939 Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact negotiated by German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. After all, the Nazis and Soviets had begun World War II together as allies with the invasion of Poland. The Germans invaded Poland from the west on September 1, 1939—a well-known date—and the Red Army invaded from the east on September 17, 1939.

Not a well-known date.

Why?

Given the USSR’s 1939–41 attacks on Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Bessarabia alone, as John Laughland writes in his 2008 book A History of Political Trials, “the Communists were therefore guilty of exactly the same crimes against peace as the Nazis. They were also guilty of numerous atrocities.”56

At first, this was another concept that brought me up short, another point of clarity that should have been obvious but had somehow been obscured by the fog of that vaporous arsenal clouding our understanding of the past. It wasn’t right to convict Hitler’s successors of charges that Stalin was equally guilty of and call it not only justice but Perfect, Lodestar Justice for the Ages. One of the many proofs of the corruption of Nuremberg lies in the fact that when a German defense counsel named Alfred Seidl brought forward the first public evidence of the secret protocol to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact that divided the nations and peoples of Europe between Hitler and Stalin—evidence of Stalin’s guilt of committing “conspiracy to wage aggressive war,” one of the key charges against the German high command—Seidl’s evidence, a verified copy of the protocol, was ruled inadmissible. In open court—and not just any open court, but the model court of a new international order—the Western Allies signed on to a Soviet conspiracy of silence conceived of and directed by Stalin. Meanwhile, Stalin, it turns out, had empowered a secret commission at Nuremberg “to prevent at all costs any public discussion of any aspects of Nazi-Soviet relations in 1939–1941, and, first and foremost, of the actual existence, let alone contents of the so-called secret protocols,” writes Arkady Vaksberg in his 1990 biography of Andrei Vyshinsky, Stalin’s Prosecutor. Vyshinsky headed that secret commission. “However, all his [Vyshinsky’s] worries proved unfounded; the foreign members [of the tribunal] were quite kindly disposed toward their [Soviet] Allies and certainly had no desire to strain relations.”57

In this cozy court, Seidl set off an unanticipated eruption of the facts, which the U.S. government, already in possession of the Nazi archives, might well have known even before the German lawyer made his case. Quite by chance, Seidl had overheard von Ribbentrop in the prison yard revealing the secret protocol and its contents to Hermann Göering. Seidl then embarked on a very vocal search for the document, up and down channels, eventually and clandestinely receiving a photostat of the document from an unnamed U.S. officer, who we might assume was fed up with Nuremberg “justice,” too. While the evidence wasn’t admitted in court, it entered the equally important court of public opinion. On May 22, 1946, the day after Seidl was overruled at Nuremberg, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published the once-secret protocol in its entirety, thus thwarting the conspiracy of silence.

It’s possible that without Seidl’s “indomitable” efforts, as the Post-Dispatch described them, we might never have learned about the secret protocol—certainly not for some time. The fact is, not a jot about of the Soviet criminal case came to judgment at Nuremberg—not the NKVD massacre of some twenty thousand Polish officers known as the Katyn Forest Massacre (charged to the Germans), not the forced “repatriation” of some two million Soviet-claimed refugees, which occurred thanks to essential assistance from British and U.S. troops—our very own war crime—which was still under way in Germany and elsewhere even as Nuremberg unfolded. Yes, as we’ve seen, Vyshinsky, Stalin’s all-purpose fixer and prosecutor at the notorious Moscow show trials of the 1930s (the Great Purge that liquidated tens of thousands of Soviet citizens58), kept showing up to ensure, minder-style, “that everything went off as planned, and especially to ensure that no discussion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was allowed in the courtroom.”59 However, as we’ve also seen, the presence of the man Britain’s chief prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross called “Stalin’s foremost proxy” was likely unnecessary, what with “the Tribunal,” as Telford Taylor, chief American counsel at Nuremberg, writes in his Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, “doing its best to protect [the Soviets] from embarrassment.”60

Shades of George Bush at Malta, forty years later.

Taylor’s 1992 “personal memoir” of Nuremberg only skimmed what he called the trials’ “political warts,” the “biggest wart” being “the presence of the Soviet judges on the bench.” Why? By way of explanation, Taylor invoked the “hatred and fear of communism and the Soviet Union … voiced throughout the United States,” which is no explanation at all. As for the Moscow show trials, he gently broke it to readers on page 639 that the trials “had a very bad name.” Then there was that “very ticklish matter” of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Taylor writes. Even a practically kindly passing reference to the perfidious agreement by prosecutor Shawcross was infamously omitted in deference to Soviet sensibilities.61 These were the lies and hypocrisy that led to such ghastly scenes as when, with Hermann Göring and Rudolph Hess in the dock, the Soviet prosecutor Roman Rudenko spoke on February 8, 1946. Taylor writes, “Rudenko described the [German] invasions of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and then … the Soviet Union. Certain events contemporaneous with the destruction of the Polish state seemed to have been erased from Rudenko’s memory” (emphasis added).

“Certain events,” of course, referred to the massive, simultaneous and, at that moment in the proceedings, ongoing Soviet role in said Polish destruction. Taylor’s account continued, quoting the words of the Soviet prosecutor, “On September 1, 1939 the fascist aggressors invaded Polish territory in treacherous violation of existing treaties,” [Rudenko] declaimed, and read from a document … to show “how the gangster assault of Hitler’s Germany on Poland was prepared in advance” (emphasis added).

“Prepared in advance”? Even Taylor doesn’t fail to notice Rudenko’s omission, writing, “Of course, the crucial ‘preparation in advance’ was the Nazi-Soviet treaty.”62 Taylor makes no additional comment on this brazen hypocrisy, an altered state of mind that the West dysfuntionally tolerated to a point where even as late as 1986, Soviet officials could with impunity denounce references to the historical consequences of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact as being “disinformation about the prewar policy of the USSR” and a “hackneyed lie that the Soviet-German Treaty of 1939 opened the path to the second world war.”63 Never mind that it did. Taylor does, however, note a memorable observation made by Nuremberg psychologist Dr. G. M. Gilbert: “Gilbert recorded that Goering and Hess, in disgust, took off their headphones. During the lunch break, Goering was scornful: ‘I did not think that they [the Russians] would be so shameless as to mention Poland.’”64

When Göring and Hess have the moral high ground, you know you’re in trouble—or at least you should. Knowing or not, everyone who participated in the charade at Nuremberg was complicit. In a 1962 essay titled “Who Betrays Whom?” the British writer and ex-Socialist Malcolm Muggeridge, who had famously and to the detriment of his journalistic career borne early witness to the horrors of Soviet collectivization and forced famine in the 1930s, had this to say: “Let us hope that mankind will sometime recover sufficient equanimity to get a laugh out of the spectacle of English and American judges sitting alongside Soviet ones, and solemnly pronouncing Germans guilty of the use of forced labour and of the partition of Poland.”65

Germans, but not Soviets.

No such knowing derision has ever compromised the solemn regard in which Nuremberg is still held, still respected as a civilizational milestone. Given the travesty of Soviet immunity alone, this vaunted tribunal gives off the noxious fumes of a Western show trial, albeit one conducted not to establish the phony guilt of defendants but rather to establish the phony legitimacy of the court itself—specifically the Soviet Union’s rotten central role in it. How else to regard a judicial proceeding where Moscow show trial judge Iona Timofeevich Nikitchenko presided?66 In his Nuremberg memoir, Telford Taylor opaquely introduced late-twenty-century readers to Nikitchenko as “an army judge advocate,” but in 1936, Nikitchenko made mass murderers’ row as one of the judges who signed the spurious death sentences of the “old Bolsheviks” in the first of Stalin’s public show trials that initiated the Great Purge decimation of a generation of Russians.67”We might agree, at least retrospectively,” Robert Conquest wrote in 2005 regarding Nikitchenko’s blood-soaked spot on the Nuremberg bench, “Nuremberg can be pronounced defective on this basis alone.”68

But we do not so agree, retrospectively or otherwise. Such a thought doesn’t enter our minds. Nuremberg “justice” as jointly apportioned by “Allies” who included hardened criminals-against-humanity from the USSR lives on as “a moral reference point.”69 How can that be? How can we look at darkness and see purity? Once again, Mikhail Gorbachev’s failure to accept the reality of half a million trucks and jeeps wasn’t and isn’t the only amazing game of denial in town.

Indeed, Bukovsky’s notion of Western “ideological collaboration” to serve Soviet ends has a long and storied tradition that, as the example of the 1946 Nuremberg Trials indicates, certainly goes back further than 1991. In both cases, in Moscow in 1991 and at Nuremberg in 1946, Communist doctrine and its leading agent, the Soviet Union, were allowed to slip away unrecognized, unjudged, unpunished. Perhaps it’s possible to say that the difference is that in 1946, the main motivation to protect Communism, while enabled and acquiesced to due to Allied expediency, still came from within the USSR, a co-victor, after all, in World War II. In 1991, with the USSR in tatters, the decisive block on passing judgment against the USSR, the Cold War loser, came from the West itself.

Now, what was it I said at the beginning of this chapter about finding equilibrium in the conventional wisdom about the 1989 breakup of the Soviet bloc?

I was just leading you on.