and paramilitary units, but all of the nation’s inhabitants were forced to commit to unconditional faith in Marxist-Leninist dogmas and blueprints as if these were the sacred scriptures of a historically determined, scientifically advanced prophetic religion. Soviet Communism thus shaped a political theocracy and an external global Cold War marked by infallible prophets, leadership cults, party priesthood, sacred rituals, in an apartheid culture dividing party and followers, believers and heretics, heavens and hells and permanent civil and sectarian wars.

6. The Soviet Union: The First Totalitarian State. The Soviet regime was an unprecedented monopoly of centralized ownership, power, planning, privilege, and weapons of terror in a national political-military-economic-cultural complex that marked the Soviet Union as the world’s first modern totalitarian state—before Benito Mussolini’s authoritarian “Fascist” Italy and preceding by a decade or more the totalitarian regimes of Adolf Hitler’s “National Socialist” Germany, Imperial Japan, and Mao Zedong’s early Communist China. Other totalitarian ideological takeovers of society notably include those of North Korea’s Kim dynasty, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and proliferating militant twenty-first century terrorist/theocratic movements and states. The Communist states enforced a permanent civil war and permanent purge, a terroristic totalitarian police regime ruled by an infallible supreme leader, often a cult figure, and a gulag system of labor concentration camps, and killing fields in places like the Ukraine, China, and Cambodia. States like Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam, Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and the captive nations Communist Eastern Europe also experienced long periods of such Communist brutality and there are twenty-first century parallels.

7. Lenin’s First World War Betrayals of Russia’s Democratic Hopes. Lenin’s USSR and all other Communist states were not federal unions, or “Peoples” or “Democratic Republics” or “Socialist,” as proclaimed, except in Hitler’s sense of “Volk” and “National Socialism,” but not so far as socialist theories have usually included constitutional democratic principles and institution like parliaments and independent labor unions, and non-government civil society. Lenin’s totalitarian USSR held power by myth, intolerance, violence and betrayal. His First World War betrayals include collaboration with Imperial Germany’s General Staff, whose invasion forces were far inside Russia and were eager to sabotage Russia’s war effort. Funded and brought by the Germans from exile in Switzerland, Lenin’s October 1917 coup ended for the next seventy years the democratic path which Russia had just begun.

8. Lenin’s Betrayals of Russia’s Western Democratic Allies. Lenin’s immediate armistice upon seizing power and his March 1918 Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Imperial Germany betrayed Russia’s Western democratic allies, including the United States, as a million German troops fighting in Russia were enabled to shift to the Western Front in France, where the Allies, and ultimately Soviet Russia were saved by the arrival of U.S. combat forces that assured Germany’s defeat. Lenin betrayed the Russian people by imposing a totalitarian secret police state and permanent civil war, and betrayed Russia’s neighbors by violating pledges of independence and launching invasions and subversion against them. Toward the United States, he stopped President Wilson’s provision of food and other assistance through the Hoover Commission and he stopped, as “interference,” U.S. and other Western efforts to protect military supplies they had sent to Russia from falling into German hands.

9. Stalin’s Soviet Betrayals before the Second World War. Lenin’s successor Joseph Stalin further intensified the violent reach of the Soviet totalitarian state. Stalin’s rule was marked by permanent terroristic civil war at home; systematic terror enforced through gulag concentration camps and extreme measures like the Ukrainian genocide. His betrayals include aggression against neighbors, subversion around the globe, and collaboration with the totalitarian Axis powers. Soviet betrayals included the Rapallo Treaty of 1922 helping Germany to violate the Versailles Treaty, and Soviet violations of the Roosevelt-Litvinov recognition agreement of 1933. Soviet 1930s collaboration with Hitler’s National Socialist Third Reich against democratic parties and nations included hunting down socialists and Jews, and culminated in the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939 that in September launched the Second World War with the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland.

10. Stalin’s Soviet Betrayals in Starting and Expanding the Second World War. The German-Soviet invasion of Poland was followed in May 1940 by Nazi invasions of western and northern European democracies and a bombing blitz and invasion threat against England. For the first twenty-one months of the Second World War, Stalin, Molotov and other Communist Party leaders cheered Hitler’s conquests as war between “capitalists” and conducted strategic materials trade with Nazi Germany. Stalin’s

[Book pg. ix]