The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil

by Michael Malice

Congressman John McDowell (R-Pa.) was also baffled by her testimony. “You paint a very dismal picture of Russia,” he pointed out. “Doesn’t anybody smile in Russia anymore?” “Well, if you ask me literally,” she replied, “pretty much no.” McDowell was incredulous.

For a woman notorious for long-winded ideological speeches in her novels, Rand’s reply to Congressman McDowell might be the most powerful statement she ever produced: Look, it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free. It is in a way good that you can’t even conceive of what it is like. Certainly they have friends and mothers-in-law. They try to live a human life, but you understand it is totally inhuman. Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning until night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don’t know who or when is going to do what to you because you may have friends who spy on you, where there is no law and any rights of any kind

Terror had become democratized, and dynamite called to young socialist extremists like a siren song. As one anarchist writer later put it: When Free Speech is suppressed, when men are jailed for asking food, clubbed for assembling to discuss their grievances, and stoned for expressing their opinions, there is but one recourse—violence. The ruling class has guns, bullets, bayonets, police, jails, militia, armies and navies. To oppose all this the worker has only—dynamite.

The tension between labor and capital seemed to be escalating out of everyone’s control, just twenty years after what had already been the bloodiest conflict that America had ever seen. The corporate press did its part to add fuel to the fire. As the New York Times opined on April 25, 1886: The strike question is, of course, the dominant one and is disagreeable in a variety of ways. A short and easy way to settle it is urged in some quarters, which, is to indict for conspiracy every man who strikes, and summarily lock him up. This method would undoubtedly strike a wholesome terror into the hearts of the working classes.

Almost a century and a half after his death, his most famous photograph stares at the viewer with the sizzling smolder of a contemporary male model.

Frick never lost consciousness and even refused anesthesia. Nor did Frick lose his will in the slightest. Before he even left for the hospital, he issued a statement: This incident will not change the attitude of the Carnegie Steel Company towards the Amalgamated Association. I do not think I shall die, but whether I do or not, the Company will pursue the same policy, and it will win. In this Frick was absolutely correct. Not only did the assassination attempt fail completely, it only served to humanize Frick and gain him sympathy. That the capitalist newspapers would condemn Berkman was no surprise: “There are no worse enemies of the workingmen of this country than these same ignorant and reckless Socialists and Anarchists of foreign origin, who make so much noise about the rights and wrongs of society of which they have no intelligent comprehension,” said the New York Times.

By 1917 Lenin was thus both a has-been and a joke—but still a possible troublemaker. As historian Edward Crankshaw put it, “the German government…saw in this obscure fanatic one more bacillus to let loose in tottering and exhausted Russia to spread infection”.

Lenin managed to convince his comrades that they needed to sign the treaty. But General Hoffman was no fool either. As Sebestyen put it: Apart from the territory they had already lost they were forced to give up the Baltic states, Finland and nearly all Ukraine to the Central Powers and the ports of Kars, Andalan and Batum to the Turks—1.8 million square kilometres, sixty-two million people, around 32 per cent of its best agricultural land, 54 per cent of its industry and 89 per cent of its coalmines.[lxvii] This was in addition to an indemnity of 120 million gold rubles. It was devastating and it was humiliating. Lenin was denounced as a German spy and a traitor. Karl Radek had traveled with Lenin on his sealed train, but now snarled that if “we had five hundred courageous men in Petrograd we would put you in prison.”

As one prominent Tcheka operative advised, “Don’t seek for incriminating evidence as to whether the prisoners took part, by deed or word, in a rebellion against the Soviet government. You have to ask him what class he belongs to, what is his origin, his education and profession. It is those questions that should decide the fate of the defendant—and therein lies the meaning of the red terror.”[lxxii] Even Lenin thought that was going too far, but such concerns did little to stem the flow of blood.

An anarchist had bombed the Bolsheviks’ Moscow Committee building on September 25, 1919, a few months before Berkman and Goldman had arrived in Russia. The assault was denounced by anarchist leaders throughout the Soviet Union, but to little matter. Lenin unleashed the power of the Tcheka, and hundreds were arrested and tried. Lenin personally assured Berkman that “We do not persecute Anarchists of ideas, but we will not tolerate armed resistance or agitation of that character.” But as historian Paul Avrich pointed out, “Unfortunately for the ‘ideological’ anarchists, the Cheka did not bother to run its prisoners through a catechism of anarchist doctrine before meting out retribution.”

It repeatedly happened that the rich relatives of an arrested man would be notified by the Tcheka of his execution. A few weeks later, after they had somewhat recovered from their shock and grief, they would be informed that the report of the man’s death was erroneous, that he was alive and could be liberated by paying a fine, usually a very high one. Of course, the relatives would strain every effort to raise the money. Then they would suddenly be arrested for attempted bribery, their money confiscated and the prisoner shot.

The Bolsheviks often invoked mercilessness and ruthlessness in furthering their aims, and Goldman did not at all hold back when it came to spelling out exactly what she saw and exactly why she so condemned it: As an Anarchist […] I would naturally insist on the importance of the individual and of personal liberty, but in the revolutionary period both must be subordinated to the good of the whole. Other friends point out that destruction, violence, and terrorism are inevitable factors in a revolution. As a revolutionist, they say, I cannot consistently object to the violence practised by the Bolsheviki.[ciii] […] The argument that destruction and terror are part of revolution I do not dispute. I know that in the past every great political and social change necessitated violence.[civ] Yet it is one thing to employ violence in combat, as a means of defence. It is quite another thing to make a principle of terrorism, to institutionalize it, to assign it the most vital place in the social struggle.[cv] […] The sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood—these fundamentals of the real regeneration of society—the Communist State suppressed to the point of extermination. Man’s instinctive sense of equity was branded as weak sentimentality; human dignity and liberty became a bourgeois superstition; the sanctity of life, which is the very essence of social reconstruction, was condemned as unrevolutionary, almost counter-revolutionary.

Two years of earnest study, investigation, and research convinced me that the great benefits brought to the Russian people by Bolshevism exist only on paper, painted in glowing colours to the masses of Europe and America by efficient Bolshevik propaganda. As advertising wizards the Bolsheviki excel anything the world had ever known before. But in reality the Russian people have gained nothing from the Bolshevik experiment.[cvii] “Those familiar with the real situation in Russia,” Goldman also wrote, “and who are not under the mesmeric influence of the Bolshevik superstition or in the employ of the Communists will bear me out that I have given a true picture. The rest of the world will learn in due time.”

The year 1920 had started with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt writing to a colleague that, “I have had some nice talks with Herbert Hoover before he went west for Christmas. He is certainly a wonder and I wish we could make him President of the United States. There could not be a better one.”

The man who became known as Joseph Stalin was born as Iosif Dzhugashvili in what is now the country of Georgia in 1870.

Um, that would have made him 83 in 1953. Maybe a typo for "1878"?

Not only was there no place to hide food, but there was little possibility to hide having had any food. Anything other than increasing gauntness was an indication that a person was, somehow, providing for themselves. One glance at a face told the activists everything they needed to know. If a person somehow managed to find and conceal food, that only forestalled the inevitable. Their own body would betray them. Starvation was not simply a consequence: it was the goal, and it was the law. Stalin intended to break the Ukrainians once and for all.

One Russian correspondent described the mindset of his colleagues, pointing out that every nation has its contingent of professional interpreters of Russia who have made it their life’s career to maintain appearances for the U.S.S.R. as Utopia-in-construction. With few exceptions they are a high-minded crew, coloring and concealing things with the noblest motives. Devotees of the theory of multiple truths, they speak more candidly than they write, and they think more candidly than they speak. They would as soon give the undiluted truth to their politically backward countrymen, whether readers of The Nation or the comic strips, as they would administer poison to children. Theirs is the logic of old-fashioned mothers who lie about sex to pubescent daughters—the American public, in their view, is simply too young, politically speaking, for the facts of Russian life. A few of them, I know, have inner qualms; the rest, on the contrary, feel positively heroic, strong in their ability to dispense with petty bourgeois prejudices about truth and mass brutality.

It was Duranty who in 1921 had insisted that “In a country rotten with corruption the communists are honest.”[cxxxvii] In 1923, after Lenin’s famine that also killed millions, Duranty wrote that “Lenin has often been called the ‘Red dictator.’ This designation is wrong; Lenin never had the right to dictate, although in practice his opinion generally carried the day.”[cxxxviii] Lenin earned his position because of his greatness, insisted Duranty: “The secret of Lenin’s authority, which did in fact amount to dictatorship, was that long experience had proved him right far oftener than his colleagues.”

As early as 1928 Stalin had famously insisted that “as we move forward, the resistance of the capitalist elements will increase [and] the class struggle will intensify”. Meaning, repression and state authoritarianism in some contexts should be expected to increase, not lessen, as communism remade society. After all, “we are ousting and ruining, perhaps without noticing it ourselves, by our progress towards socialism, thousands upon thousands of small and medium capitalist industrialists. Is it possible to think that these ruined people will sit in silence, not trying to organize resistance? Of course not.”

In field after field, an official Communist Party line became a new orthodoxy from which deviation was regarded as nothing more than heresy. Even as he was on his way out of power in 1924, Trotsky was still claiming that “The party is always right” and “One cannot be right against the party.”[clxix] On this Stalin agreed with his rival. “An Enemy of the People,” he once said, “is not only one who does sabotage but one who doubts the rightness of the Party line. And there are a lot of them and we must liquidate them.”[clxx] It was not only impermissible to be a critic but one could not even be an agnostic, let alone a skeptic. The freedom of speech and expression that had long been a promise of socialism had given way to a system where even freedom of thought was intolerable, and grounds for execution.

The consequence of the simple and ingenious device of “guilt by association” is that as soon as a man is accused, his former friends are transformed immediately into his bitterest enemies; in order to save their own skins, they volunteer information and rush in with denunciations to corroborate the nonexistent evidence against him; this obviously is the only way to prove their own trustworthiness. Retrospectively, they will try to prove that their acquaintance or friendship with the accused was only a pretext for spying on him and revealing him as a saboteur, a Trotskyite, a foreign spy, or a Fascist. Merit being “gauged by the number of your denunciations of close comrades,” it is obvious that the most elementary caution demands that one avoid all intimate contacts, if possible—not in order to prevent discovery of one’s secret thoughts, but rather to eliminate, in the almost certain case of future trouble, all persons who might have not only an ordinary cheap interest in your denunciation but an irresistible need to bring about your ruin simply because they are in danger of their own lives.

Yet the interrogators themselves were also under enormous personal duress. “If some of you entertain doubts and vacillations,” Yezhov told his men, “if some of you, for this or that reason, do not feel strong enough to cope with the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bandits, then let them say so and we shall release them from the investigation.”[ccxvii] It was a beautiful piece of totalitarian doublespeak. The only reason someone might feel the need to show mercy to those who were plotting against the people would be some sort of sympathy with them, or some sort of squeamishness about the Party’s process. Both were themselves clear grounds for arrest, and the interrogators more than anyone else knew exactly what that would entail.

It is unknown whether Kosior’s refusal to break earned him the grudging respect of his captors or simply angered them even more. It remains unclear whether they had their eventual ace in the hole the entire time and were toying with him, or if their idea only came when nothing else seemed to work—or perhaps there was a line even the NKVD wanted to avoid crossing if there remained any possibility of avoiding it. What we do know is that the interrogators brought in Kosior’s sixteen-year-old daughter Tamara, and raped her in front of him.[ccxl] That did it. That finally broke Stanislav Kosior. Kosior duly signed the confession that he, an ethnic Pole, had been a Polish spy. His execution was not immediate; he managed to outlive Tamara, who committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. Whether Tamara’s death should technically be counted as one of the NKVD’s victims is an academic question. It is unlikely it was she who the New York Times had in mind when they published a 2017 opinion piece explaining “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.”[ccxli] But history has at least recorded her name, unlike those of so many thousands of others whose very existence has been entirely wiped away.

What was The Nation’s first reaction to the announcement of the initial “Trotskyist” trial? Not even decent astonishment. “It was to be expected that under the velvet glove of the New Soviet constitution,” it wrote, “there would still be the firm outlines of the iron hand. There can be no doubt the dictatorship in Russia is dying and that a new democracy is slowly being born.” The impending death of thousands of communists was thus another confirmation that the dictatorship is dying![ccliii] The gallant New Republic in its first reaction blandly assumed that the fantastic charges compounded by the G.P.U. were true. “Perhaps the deepest lesson to be learned from the Russian trial,” it declared, “is the profound, unchangeable stubbornness of human nature. From the standpoint of practical expediency, these men had little to gain and much to lose by their effort to bring down the Soviet state in ruins.”

The youngest themselves were not free from being arrested and put on trial, and getting them to confess was child’s play. It only took a single night of interrogation to get one ten-year-old detainee to admit that he had joined a fascist organization at the age of seven. Other kids who were not suspects themselves were forced to publicly approve of the arrests and executions of their parents for having been spies.[cclvii] Their entire class or school would assemble and the student would be berated until they denounced their mother and/or father in front of their fellow classmates.

Early in 1932 over ten thousand veterans of the Great War had camped out in Washington, DC, living in shanties that they had assembled from random junk. Destitute, they demanded that the bonuses due to them in 1945 be made redeemable now. That July they were ordered to clear out by the police. They rioted instead, and two vets ending up getting killed. President Hoover now had ten thousand ex-military men on his front stoop. Things were escalating into a crisis, completely out of the president’s control—seemingly par for the course for his administration. Hoover sent in troops to clear out the veterans that same day. Backed up by Majors George S. Patton and Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur led a military contingent and carried out Hoover’s orders successfully—but the idea of literally sending in the tanks against hungry American veterans was a complete public relations disaster.

Sinclair’s stated purpose in writing The Jungle had been to spread the message of socialism to the American people. Instead, the Federal Government became a guarantor of the quality of products of private industry at public cost. Rather than the state operating the factories, the capitalists continued to produce their meat unabated. Despite the author’s best efforts, his book did not whet the population’s appetite for a socialist takeover of the meat industry. As Sinclair put it, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” To this day—largely due to Sinclair—it is regarded as an uncontroversial truth that the government is the best and only agency with the capacity to certify the safety of food. The alternative would “obviously” be mass death and illness.

After vacillating for a while, FDR finally agreed to meet with Sinclair. On September 4, 1934, Sinclair made his way to the president’s upstate New York estate at Hyde Park for a conversation that, by all accounts, was highly amiable. In his typical reptilian fashion, FDR made sure that Sinclair left the meeting with the belief that the president agreed with him and would come out publicly against the very concept of profit. Roosevelt told Sinclair that he intended to give a speech on or around October 25th—right before the election—advocating Sinclair’s preferred “production for use” as against production for profit. “If you will do that, Mr. President,” Sinclair said, “it will elect me.”[cclxxi] FDR of course intended nothing of the kind. It only took him five days before he was throwing Sinclair under the bus, but doing so off-the-record to reporters so that the gubernatorial candidate was none the wiser. Not only calling the scale of Sinclair’s EPIC plan “utterly impossible,” FDR went on to paint Sinclair as a fanatic. “If Sinclair has any sense in him,” the president said, “he will modify at least in practice this perfectly wild-eyed scheme of his and carry it on as a community experiment.”[cclxxii] It was on October 24th, not the 25th, Roosevelt did in fact give a speech. He told a group of bankers that America has “what we call—and accept—as a profit system.” Rather than endorsing Sinclair’s socialist vision, Roosevelt reiterated his view of free enterprise as the b...

In words that would sound chilling within a decade, Sinclair’s view of the mass Ukrainian starvation was that “I venture to doubt that five million were permitted to die.” “Permitted” is one of those words that have different meanings. At the very least, Sinclair was claiming that the Soviet government wouldn’t allow such a thing to happen without acting to prevent it. That Stalin was in fact responsible for those deaths didn’t even enter Sinclair’s thoughts as a consideration. “My guess,” Sinclair continued, “is that it is nearer to one million, but that was enough.” What basis Sinclair had for this admitted guess he never says. But what’s a few million lives here or there?

In regards to the “obviously phoney trials,” Sinclair claimed to have taken a balanced view: Over and over again I ask myself: Is it conceivable that revolutionists, trained in a lifetime of war against the Czar, would go into open court and confess to actions which they had not committed? I ask: Is there any torture, any kind of terror, physical, mental, or moral, which would induce them to such a thing?[cclxxxv] Rhetorical questions are perhaps of use rhetorically, but they do not affect reality in the slightest. If an individual cannot conceive of an answer to a question, that does not mean or even imply that the answer is inconceivable. It could simply mean that his knowledge or imagination is limited. The man who wrote of greedy capitalists selling sausages made of human meat found it impossible that men, even men trained in a lifetime of war, could be tortured to such a degree that they would make false confessions—even if they were confessing to things which were demonstrably false and literally impossible.

There are very few loanwords that English speakers have borrowed from the Russian language. “Robot” is often considered to be one of these, even though the origin is Czech. “Bistro” is another, the allegation being that Russian customers would yell “Bistro, bistro!” (“Quickly, quickly!”) at French waitstaff in attempts to get them to hurry—but this seems to be more of a good story than good etymology. But there is one word in English whose Russian origin is not in dispute: Gulag. The term’s Russian origin is itself an acronym for Glavnoye Upravleniye Lagerey, which translates to Chief Administration of the Camps.

Yet unlike Sartre or Dreiser or virtually all of the “400 leading Americans,” Vice President Wallace had visited the Soviet Union personally. And not only did he visit, he toured the Siberian Gulag town of Magadan himself. “Over 40,000,000 people have taken the place of the 7,000,000—mostly convicts—who miserably existed there under Imperial Russia,” Wallace explained. He compared the Siberian growth in population to how “America after the Civil War developed her wild West, pushing triumphantly to the Pacific and creating what Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Denver mean today.”[cccvi] One might think that perhaps the climate and therefore livability in Los Angeles would in and of itself make the comparison to Siberian development a reach, but that was hardly the worst of it. Wallace credulously reported his Russian contact telling him that, “Twelve years ago the first settlers arrived and put up eight prefabricated houses. Today Magadan has 40,000 inhabitants and all are well housed.”[cccvii] Wallace helpfully explained that “urban growth in northern Siberia is a proof that the climate is not an insuperable obstacle to settlement in the Arctic,” as if a bunch of adventurous families had all decided to pack up and try to make their claim in Siberia. He was just blown away by these plucky Russians: “The remarkable fact is that this Siberian urban growth is taking place in advance of rail and motor-road communications.”

The worst part, perhaps, was how Wallace breezily dismissed the millions of people starved by Stalin in the Ukraine and elsewhere as merely a price to be paid for progress: Collective farming, to Stalin, was a method of making agriculture more productive, of getting the food surplus necessary to support urban workers. We in the United States may regard the methods employed as too costly in human terms, but there is no denying that it was a measure for integrating farm output with urban growth, and a necessary measure if the industrialization plan, out of which came Karaganda and the other new [Gulag] towns, was to succeed.

Antipathy toward organized religion was central to the communist state, and there was great pressure to break the spirits of prisoners who relied on their faith. One group of female prisoners refused to wear numbered clothing due to the dictates of their religion, so the numbers were stamped directly onto their skin. For added humiliation they were forced to attend camp roll calls in the nude.[cccxlix] In 1930 another religious group regarded Soviet passports, money and the like as symbols of the Anti-Christ and refused to have anything to do with it. They were shipped to an island in the White Sea and told they could have food only if they signed for it. When they repeatedly refused they were simply left there to starve to death, which they naturally all did.

After World War II, Germany was divided by the Allies into four occupation zones: Soviet, French, American, and British. The German capital of Berlin, located entirely within the eastern Soviet zone, was itself also split into four. Though Germany was still largely in ruins, local elections were still held in the Soviet Zone in the fall of 1946. Persisting in the narrative that Soviet totalitarianism was completely the opposite of Fascist totalitarianism by every important metric, the German Communists tried to win control through democratic processes. Despite Soviet efforts, the Social Democrats were the clear victors with 49% of the vote in a three-way race. Worse, the center-right Christian Democratic Union came in second. The Communist Party was a distant third, with 20% of the vote. In no district did they come in first, not even the ones where they had had majority support before Hitler’s reign. The Russians were in a bind and took appropriate measures. That winter they began mass arrests of supposed Nazis and subversives. In practice this simply meant anyone opposed to domination from Moscow, no matter where they happened to land on the political spectrum. Then came “the People’s Police,” a further hardening of authoritarianism under the USSR’s control. Finally, the Soviets reopened the camps. Buchenwald—rechristened NKVD special camp Nr. 2—was near the city of Weimar, and Saschsenhausen—Nr. 7—a mere thirty-five kilometers from Berlin. Close to two hundred thousand ...

At the precise second that Schumann made his leap, Leiberg took his shot with his camera and got the photograph of the border guard hopping the fence to freedom. Less than two days after Operation Rose began, the world already had an iconic picture to represent those who chose to be free rather than to hurt their fellow man.

Göring’s legend was spread in East Germany, the tale of a self-sacrificing man driven to protect his country at all costs from enemies abroad. It was claimed that he was murdered in connection with a French terrorist group. Göring was posthumously given a promotion, streets were named after him, and his gravesite became a holy site (or at least the communist equivalent of one). The GDR’s attempt to valorize the border guard who tried to shoot a fleeing teenager was not entirely successful. The East German authorities were far better at creating martyrs the old-fashioned way: by killing innocents.

Yet Reagan’s speech was very well received, and did more for his political career than it did for Goldwater’s. Though she had advised the Goldwater campaign, Ayn Rand grew dissatisfied with what she perceived to be the candidate’s increasing anti-intellectualism. She was not alone in looking at the outcome of the election and proclaiming that it “is too late for the ‘conservatives.’ There is nothing left to ‘conserve.’” Nor was she alone in singling out Reagan as the Republican winner of 1964, arguing that the best of the Goldwater campaign “was a speech by Ronald Reagan. […] All of the candidate’s speeches should have been on a level equal to Mr. Reagan’s.”

Even before her great leap upward, Mrs. Thatcher had been the personification of a British middle class dream come true. Born the daughter of a grocer, she had by dint of her own abilities and application won through, securing scholarships to good schools, making a success of her chosen career, and marrying advantageously. It is not surprising then that she espouses the middle class values of thrift, hard work, and law and order, that she believes in individual choice, maximum freedom for market forces, and minimal power for the state. Hers is the genuine voice of a beleaguered bourgeoise, anxious about its eroding economic power and determined to arrest society’s seemingly inexorable trend towards collectivism.

Unfortunately for her prospects of becoming a national, as distinct from a party, leader, she has over the years acquired a distinctively upper middle class personal image. Her immaculate grooming, her imperious manner, her conventional and somewhat forced charm, and above all her plummy voice stamp her as the quintessential suburban matron, and frightfully English to boot. None of this goes down well with the working class of England (one-third of which used to vote Conservative), to say nothing of all classes in the Celtic fringes of this island.

Just as with the British politicians, Ford seemed excruciatingly incompetent when it came to meeting this challenge. His campaign to Whip Inflation Now—complete with WIN buttons—seemed both clueless and pointless. The premise may have been a sound one: a rejection of Nixon’s wage and price controls in favor of private citizens doing their part to stem inflation. Suggestions like “having more Americans plant vegetable gardens, turn down their thermostats and carpool as a way of cutting down on energy use and helping to restrain prices” do not even pretend to address the root causes of inflation or even to identify them. The rising prices and falling buying power of the dollar were a function of things like the money supply, costs of production, and prices set by business—none of which the average citizen had much control over.

When the election results came in, it was Goldwater in 1964 all over again—only this time it was the incumbent president cast as the electoral loser. In addition to Washington DC—and just as Goldwater had—Jimmy Carter only took six states. Ronald Reagan was elected in a landslide, with his coattails ushering in a Republican Senate for the first time since Eisenhower. As 1981 began, what had been considered an absurdity five years prior became a reality in both the United States and the UK: both governments were now under the control of members of the right-wing half of each nation’s respective right-wing party. That same year British group Fun Boy Three wrote a hit single expressing the views of many individuals in the halls of power about this unprecedented situation. It was entitled “The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum.”

As Thatcher anticipated, her monetarist approach to the economy caused a short-term worsening of economic conditions as a means of eventually resolving the problems of both rising unemployment and of inflation. “Yes, the medicine is harsh,” she acknowledged, “but the patient requires it in order to live…We did not seek election and win in order to manage the decline of a great nation.” As she also anticipated, by 1981 the worst economic news was beginning to pass and Thatcher’s political hand strengthened. That September, in a bid to assert her control of the government, Thatcher had a very public reshuffling of her cabinet in what became known as “the purging of the wets.”

Yet his grandfather, like so many other loyal Communists, kept the faith until the very end. “He was convinced that Stalin did not know about the misdeeds of the NKVD and he never blamed the Soviet regime for his misfortunes,”[cdlxxviii] Gorbachev wrote, though “misfortunes” is quite the odd word for him to use here. Despite all this Gorbachev grew up as a firm believer in the Soviet system, and through diligence and hard work rose swiftly through the ranks of the Party after graduating from university. Due to his work he thus became one of the few Russian citizens permitted to go abroad. It was when Gorbachev visited Prague in 1969 that he first understood how the Soviet Union was seen by citizens in other communist countries. It had only been a year since the Russians had sent in the tanks to put down the Prague Spring, and when Gorbachev visited a factory the workers literally turned their backs to him in a blatant show of contempt.[cdlxxix] The USSR’s power was not viewed—as the Soviet papers claimed—as “fraternal help.”

This was the thinking behind the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The concept was to figure out a way to stop nuclear missiles from hitting their target after they had been fired. How this was to be done was an enormously difficult question, for effectively it would be akin to shooting a bullet with another bullet after the trigger had been pulled. One of the hypothesized solutions would be defensive missiles fired from satellites, which earned the program the nickname “Star Wars.” Critics thought the program unworkable and derided the entire project to be an enormous waste of money. As Thatcher herself told Reagan at their Camp David meeting, “Even if an SDI system proved 95% successful—a significant success rate—over sixty million people would still die from those weapons that got through.”[cdlxxxiii] But what if it did work? In that event, with the Soviet Union’s missiles rendered powerless, the United States would have a de facto nuclear monopoly against the USSR, just as it had in the brief window after World War II before Stalin got the bomb. For Gorbachev this was of course completely unacceptable, as he made plain both publicly and to Thatcher directly.

Several weeks later, Gorbachev offered Reagan a proposal: the complete abolition of nuclear weapons by the turn of the century. The only catch was that President Reagan would have to give up on SDI. To apply further pressure, Gorbachev made his offer publicly. Reagan and his advisers had two different reactions. The president wanted to take the Soviet offer at face value and to even go one better. “Why wait until the end of the century for a world without nuclear weapons?” Reagan asked his team.[cdxc] Thatcher represented the opposing view. Privately she found Reagan’s perspective both delusional and naïve, and had no problem quietly making that clear. “It was one of the few times, you know, when I think his aspirations left the reality of human nature,” she said.[cdxci] “The fundamental truth here is that the nuclear weapon cannot be disinvented. A world without nuclear weapons is thus quite simply a fantasy world.”[cdxcii] And despite her warm feelings toward Gorbachev, she still understood how politics worked: “It is inconceivable that the Soviets would turn over their last nuclear weapon. They would cheat. I would cheat.”

Author Suzanne Massie taught President Reagan the Russian rhyme doverai no proverai, which means “trust, but verify.” It was one of two slogans that guided his thinking in negotiations with the USSR: the two countries would have a basis of trust in their discussions and agreements, but this needed to be supplemented by some mechanism to ensure that each party was holding to its commitments. Alongside this was the concept of “peace through strength,” akin to Teddy Roosevelt’s “speak softly and carry a big stick.” It was a lot easier to fight for peace when one is prepared for the opposite. In Reagan’s view, it wasn’t his famous charm that was crucial to getting the Russians to negotiate but the US military spending which had more than doubled since he had assumed office. As Reagan sarcastically put it: “Trust and understanding, it is said, will lead to arms control. Hearing people say that is like meeting grown-ups who still believe in the tooth fairy.”

On June 12, 1987, as Reagan drove in the presidential limo to Berlin’s famous Brandenburg Gate, he turned to his Chief of Staff Ken Duberstein and reiterated his decision. “The boys at State are going to kill me,” he said, “but it’s the right thing to do.” Directly behind the Brandenburg Gate lurked the Berlin Wall and all that it symbolized. Reagan stood in front of an enormous crowd—and an array of television cameras from all over the world—and issued his challenge. “General Secretary Gorbachev,” he said, “if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The audience erupted into hysterics. The East German authorities were livid, and the Soviet ones not much better. What was seen in the West as a call of defiance was taken in Moscow as a challenge to Gorbachev personally and to the USSR specifically. Savvy minds on the far side of the Iron Curtain understood that if the Berlin Wall were torn down then the entire communist system would likely be tore down with it. Because

On August 25, 1989, the day after Tadeusz Mazowiecki became Poland’s prime minister, Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth secretly flew to the West German capital of Bonn to meet with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Nemeth did not waste time with pleasantries. “'We have decided to allow the GDR citizens to leave freely, mainly on humanitarian grounds,” he informed Kohl. “It seems you may have to deal with 100,000 or even 150,000 new citizens arriving very quickly.”

The community had been succumbing to filth and pollution as factories spewed smoke into the atmosphere as the populace gradually fled to seek refuge elsewhere. Meeting at the 800-year-old St. Nicholas Church, protestors lit candles every Monday evening and began to march. Soon thousands joined, if only because there was so little else for them to do. Claiming that the “Chinese comrades must be lauded” because they “were able to smother the protest before the situation got out of hand,” Stasi leader Erich Mielke insisted on East Germany having its own Tiananmen Square massacre. “The situation here now is comparable and must be countered with all means and methods,” he told his subordinates. But the East German leadership was still torn to the point of paralysis. By September 18, 1989 the Leipzig protestors numbered 15,000 marchers. The Stasi arrested a hundred of them, running over others as they sped away. But that did little to stop the masses, and did much to further alienate the population from the regime.