Ghosts of the Cold War

“Here I am, then. I have come home.” 

So said Pope John Paul II after landing in Warsaw in 1983, bending to kiss the soil of his native country. The mood was patriotic and defiant. “Poland for the Poles!” came the shouts from the crowd—union men, priests, fathers and their sons. “We are the real Poland!” The pope continued: “I consider it my duty to be with my fellow countrymen in this sublime and at the same time difficult moment.” 

The demonstrators unfurled banners advertising the Solidarity movement and chanted the name of its leader, Lech Wałęsa. The 81-year-old Wałęsa, one of the great heroes of the Cold War, is still very much with us, and still engaged in public affairs. “Gratitude is due to the heroic Ukrainian soldiers who shed their blood in defense of the values of the free world,” he said earlier this week. “We do not understand how the leader of a country that is a symbol of the free world cannot see this.”

Wałęsa is not the only figure from that day who remains part of our public life. He and other supporters of Polish sovereignty, in Poland and around the world, were being spied on by the KGB’s foreign-operations directorate, whose roster of murderers, torturers, and villains included Vladimir Putin. The KGB’s mission was to do in Poland what it had done in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s—suppress the movement for liberty and sovereignty. The ghost of the KGB is now working toward that end in Ukraine.

Cold War fantasies such as The Manchurian Candidate imagined it would take some incredible and complicated scheme to put a man willing to do the bidding of the KGB and its analogues and epigones into Washington’s halls of power. In reality, all it took was a man whose values align with those of the KGB rather than with those of the Founding Fathers. 

Some of my friends believe that there is some dark backstory to Donald Trump worthy of a 1970s political thriller: some kompromat, some financial leverage, something. That could be the case, but I would not be surprised that when the history of our time is written—if the history of our time is permitted to be written—what we will learn is that Trump did Moscow’s bidding because he prefers the politics of Putin to those of, say, Dwight Eisenhower, while sycophants such as J.D. Vance and Ted Cruz did Moscow’s bidding on behalf of Trump because they preferred being on the inside to being on the outside.

(These are unhappy men: To live in fear of being on the outside looking in is to deny oneself the rarefied pleasure—the great genuine joy—of being on the outside looking out.)

What was it that had the pope and his fellow Poles ready to take on Moscow? And what kind of enemy was the regime Putin served? Ask a statistician, in this case R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii, who wrote a considerable book on Moscow’s “democide,” as he called it. 

Probably 61,911,000 people, 54,769,000 of them citizens, have been murdered by the Communist Party—the government—of the Soviet Union. This is about 178 people for each letter, comma, period, digit, and other characters in this book.

Old and young, healthy and sick, men and women, and even infants and infirm, were killed in cold blood. They were not combatants in civil war or rebellions, they were not criminals. Indeed, nearly all were guilty of … nothing.

Some were from the wrong class—bourgeoisie, land owners, aristocrats, kulaks. Some were from the wrong nation or race—Ukrainians, Black Sea Greeks, Kalmyks, Volga Germans. Some were from the wrong political faction—Trotskyites, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries. Or some were just their sons and daughters, wives and husbands, or mothers and fathers. And some were those occupied by the Red Army—Balts, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians. Then some were simply in the way of social progress, like the mass of peasants or religious believers. Or some were eliminated because of their potential opposition, such as writers, teachers, churchmen; or the military high command; or even high and low Communist Party members themselves.

… An infant born in 1917 had a good chance of being killed by the Party sometime in his future. A more precise statement of this is given by the average of the democide rates for each period, weighted by the number of years involved. Focusing on the most-probable mid-risk of .45 percent, throughout Soviet history, including the relatively safe years after the 1950s, the odds of the average citizen being killed by his own government has been about 45 to 10,000; or to turn this around, 222 to 1 of surviving terror, deportations, the camps, or an intentional famine. As pointed out in the text, this is almost twenty times the risk of an American dying in a vehicular accident.

Among the great holocausts of the 20^th century, the German one stands out for its particular horrors, the Chinese one for the scale of its enormity, and the Russian one—ah, but which Russian one? Vladimir Putin’s employers and patrons had a long time to do their murdering, from the gulag to the Lubyanka. The one most relevant to today’s headlines is the one inflicted on Ukraine in the 1930s, the Holodomor, when Moscow engineered the intentional deaths by famine of as many as 5 million people in order to crush the Ukrainian independence movement. Putin today bombs maternity hospitals to crush the spirit—and the fact—of Ukrainian independence. Mass graves, torture, murder—this isn’t a new story for Russians in Ukraine.

“Peace,” say the ladies and gentlemen over at Fox News. That’s what this is all about, we are to believe: peace. Let’s not get all judgmental about who murdered whom. There is not much one can say in defense of the man, but Roger Ailes was at least more straightforward than the current Fox News brass when it came to forcing employees to assume undignified positions as the price of career advancement. 

Back to 1983 for a moment: 

The pope said a “kiss placed on the soil of Poland” is “like a kiss placed on the hands of a mother,” adding the nation has “suffered much” and “therefore has a right to a special love.”

Ukraine has suffered much at the hands of the same people—and in the case of KGB veteran Vladimir Putin, literally the same people. And, under the current American dispensation, it has a right to … be stripped of its natural resources, apparently, not to mention its sovereignty, and handed over, once again, to domination by the people who have killed millions of Ukrainians and who will, with the tacit consent of these United States, kill many more.

The Poles were fortunate to have a pope who could say: “Here I am, then. I have come home.” It is good to have one of your own in a high place. But Ronald Reagan wasn’t Polish. Margaret Thatcher wasn’t Polish. William F. Buckley Jr. wasn’t Polish. You didn’t have to be Polish to understand what was happening in 1983. You don’t have to be Ukrainian to understand what is happening today. And though a lot of these proud American patriots turn out to be on the Kremlin’s payroll, that doesn’t explain the bigger story. 

Pro-Russian Republicans are pro-Russian because they are pro-Russian. You don’t have to be Russian, or a covert Russian asset, to prefer Moscow’s way of doing things. You don’t have to be an actual literal idiot to be a useful idiot in the Cold War sense, though it helps. You just have to choose to side with the Kremlin. Trump and Vance have chosen, Pete Hegseth and Tucker Carlson have chosen, and Republicans have chosen to go along with them. Reagan spoke of “a time for choosing.” Now is such a time. It always is.