The World’s Greatest Plot

How to Enslave Everybody is a contemporary tragedy, written in Moscow, produced and directed by Soviet Russians, and now being played throughout Eastern and captive Europe—with a cast of 90 million persons.

Its trial runs are rapidly nearing completion. The performance will be close to letter-perfect, by Kremlin standards, within a very few years. The tryouts are now being refined and polished in every detail. How to Enslave Everybody could be moved onto the main stages of Western Europe, the Middle East or Asia at any time. Its Cominform directors confidently predict world-wide productions in all languages.

In several respects this tragedy surpasses anything ever known before. Its plot is unquestionably the greatest in the world’s history. It contains infinitely more murder and robbery, more terror and torture, more villainy and heroism, more mockery and heartbreak than all of Shakespeare. It is exceptionally designed for universal performance.

It is no indulgence in rhetoric to state that Soviet Communism constitutes the greatest plot the world has ever seen. In what previous age have expectant conquerors organized fifth columns on every continent, in almost every country on earth? What Alexander or Caesar, what Genghis Khan, Napoleon or Hitler ever trained millions of foreign citizens to do his bidding and to betray their native lands? What conspirator in all the recorded past has devoted more than thirty years to the systematic enlistment and instruction of legions of co-conspirators inside foreign states? When before, as in Eastern Europe today, have 90 million foreign people been subjugated without resort to open war; without firing a shot in battle; without dropping a single bomb? This record has no rival. It belongs uniquely to the Soviet Communists.

Because the great Red plot is unequaled, both in its scope and in organized detail, its implications are terrifying for every free society. The place to see it, for what it is and what it threatens to become, is where the Stalinists are already scoring remarkable and ominous successes; where the techniques of Soviet world conquest are being perfected—in satellite Europe. For the ways by which half of Europe has been enslaved are precisely the ways by which the Kremlin expects to enslave the remainder of the world. These are the identical methods by which Western Europeans, North Americans, South Americans and all other free peoples can be enslaved. Iron-Curtain Europe is nothing less than a preview of world conquest by Communism.

What have the Soviets already accomplished in Eastern Europe?

They have organized such vast police armies and regular armies that half of Europe cannot be liberated by any discernible means short of a third world war.

They have made the Eastern European countries economic prisoners of the Kremlin. Their entire economic systems are sovietized. Their production and national resources are directed solely to the build-up of Soviet power.

They have controlled and regimented the life of every individual—from infants to great-grandparents, from workers to women, from bankers to beggars, from peasants to poets, from teachers to preachers, from contraltos to coffin-makers.

They have suppressed the independence of churches of every creed, and are subverting religious organizations to the political objectives of the Kremlin.

They have placed more than one million citizens in prisons and slave-labor camps, and are expanding such accommodations toward an indicated goal of several million more slaves.

They have destroyed all political opposition, and are now embarked upon wholesale liquidation of the upper and middle classes through slow starvation, mass deportations and by universal death-sentence “justice.”

They have perverted education to a monopoly instrument of Communist indoctrination.

They are “Russianizing” the cultures, history, literatures, science, arts and traditions of the East European nations.

They are well advanced toward communizing Eastern Europe’s younger generation—nearly 20 million young people below the age of 21, some 20 per cent of the total present population.

Eastern Europe, in sum, has already entered its final stages of sovietization. In the few years since 1945 the supremely individualistic Iron-Curtain countries have been unrecognizably remodeled after the Soviets’ master pattern by the Kremlin’s plotters. What is the over-all meaning of these startling achievements? In reality Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Albania and Eastern Germany have been unofficially annexed to the Soviet Union. In reality Soviet Russia extends today to Berlin and Vienna. The Red Russians hold and rule far more of Europe than the imperial Turks at the apogee of their militarist aggression. In reality, and most significant of all, sovietized Eastern Europe now emerges as a grave threat to the freedom of all Western nations—to American and British Commonwealth freedom as much as to Norwegian, French or Italian freedom. We must examine much more fully this new menace of a predominantly çommunized Eastern Europe. But an immediate question is posed:

How could the Stalinists so quickly enslave six nations?

The answer lies, I think, in our own widespread underestimation of Communist capacities and their methods. I confess that I was also guilty in this respect in 1946. After five months in the Iron-Curtain countries I had no doubts about the Kremlin’s long-term objectives. But I underrated very considerably the Stalinists’ tempo of execution. In Budapest that summer I met one official who judged the Russians’ abilities more accurately. Father Istvan Balogh was then an assistant secretary of state. He possessed an extremely acute political mind, the most gargantuan stomach I’ve ever seen, a notoriously Rabelaisian reputation—and has since, not surprisingly, become a renegade in Moscow’s service.

“The Soviets are the new Herrenvolk—the new master race,” Father Balogh declared. “Eventually they will dominate Europe.”

“But are they efficient enough to organize half of Europe?” I objected.

First, a knowing smile above his astoundingly huge midriff. Then a confident declaration. “They don’t have to be very efficient. … They will smother all of Eastern Europe.”

The smothering of satellite Europe required no more than another five years—not perhaps seven or eight, as I had imagined. In this brief period the Russian Communists proved themselves much more efficient than Father Balogh himself seemed to anticipate. Not in Western terms of technical organization and production of goods. They proved themselves highly efficient in creating extensions of their police-state machine; in exporting and expanding their own slave-state system—much more so, in fact, than the Nazis ever were. This is something we need desperately to understand. It explains why Russia’s Red totalitarianism is a greater, more universal menace than Germany’s Brown totalitarianism was at its peak. Having seen the Nazis take over the Danubian countries in 1940, the contrasts strike me with particular force.

Maybe it was largely due to one fact. Hitler’s Nazis were handicapped by being engaged in a great war, so they never sought to impose absolute controls on all sections of conquered civilian populations. Save for the Jews, they cultivated the support of Eastern Europe’s capitalists and free enterprisers. They played up to the aristocrats and feudal landowners. They scarcely interfered with the churches. They left most civil servants and white-collar workers undisturbed in their jobs. So long as middle-class citizens remained passively neutral they were relatively unmolested. The Nazis had neither the time nor the personnel to enslave entire populations; and they could not afford to attempt it then. Near-normalcy and a pronounced surface show of courtesy were two of the neatest tricks of Nazi domination. Their Gestapo brutalities and crimes were concealed so successfully that I met many Hungarians and Rumanians, in 1946, who still believed that Nazi incineration camps were products of Western propaganda.

But Russia’s Communists did not come as superficial, old-fashioned space conquerors only. Their revolutionary drills and dynamite charges were directed at the social, political and economic foundations of Eastern Europe’s nations. Their basic structures must be leveled and replaced—and the Stalinists knew from long experience and training exactly how this should be done. After the first months of dissimulation and under-cover maneuvering the Red “liberators” had no reason to placate the ruling classes. Their objective was to gain absolute power. And the Moscow-trained Communists had precise orders how to do it—orders which are still good for application anywhere in the world. On May 9, 1941, these same orders were delivered by the Comintern to Tito in Yugoslavia. That date is revealing. It was not only six weeks before Hitler invaded Russia. It was exactly four years before the war in Europe ended. But it still remains:

The official Kremlin blueprint for Communist seizure of power in any foreign country.

These are the major points in the Cominform’s instructions to Tito, directly quoted: ¹

1. “The time has come when we must take new decisive steps toward world revolution. [All italics used in this book are the author’s, unless otherwise stated.]

(a) “The Communist world revolution must be presented as a series of measures to achieve ‘real democracy’ …

(b) “The government of the Soviet Union may also find it necessary to make some temporary concessions … to promote the revolutionary cause in those countries where conditions warrant it.

(c) “The Communist Party, until the seizure of power, should be careful to maintain, in the countries where the revolution is being prepared, good relations with patriotic and religious circles. No discrimination should be made against the churches. … National tradition should be respected. Wherever necessary … representatives of the churches should be allowed to contribute in the preparation and carrying through of the revolution. Their numerical strength should determine the rate at which church influence is later to be eliminated from state affairs.

(d) “The press should be used …

(f) “Immediately after the seizure of power the Central Committee will set up a new government. This shall be representative of the broad masses of the people and appear democratic. …

(g) “Opponents of the new administration … should be removed as soon as possible, but in democratic fashion—that is to say, be brought to trial before a regular court or a People’s Court. The latter should comprise one known member of the party and two secret members or sympathizers. …

2. “The country should not apply for inclusion in the Soviet Union until instructions to this effect have been received from the … Comintern.

4. “Traitors to the party are to be liquidated without trial once their treachery has been submitted to the party organization. … The death penalty is prescribed for treachery of any sort against the interest of the Communist revolution.

6. “The term ‘class enemy’ comprises the following groups: members of ideological movements of a nationalist or religious character, priests, members of the police force, officers, diplomats and civil servants when they refuse to side with the revolutionary forces; all members of dynasties, any individuals known to have opposed the preparation or the carrying out of the revolution.

7. “After the party has seized power, it shall dispose of funds, separate from state funds, taken from the following sources: property belonging to class enemies who have been liquidated, or whose possessions have been confiscated … ; property belonging to hostile movements and organizations; property confiscated from the churches, the ruling dynasty and war profiteers.”

This is the nature of the greatest plot in the world. The Comintern’s official chart for the internal betrayal and conquest of foreign nations speaks for itself. In its organized precision, duplicity, brutality and cynicism it has certainly never been exceeded by any group of political gangsters in any century; certainly never approached in its world-wide scope of projected application. Every detail of the Comintern’s instructions has long since been executed in each Iron-Curtain country. The satellite nations have thereby been transformed into the Kremlin’s first great foreign training ground for global domination.

But there’s another notable distinction between the Nazis’ frenetic, space-grabbing methods of conquest and those employed by the Reds. The Soviets do not aim merely to get more and bigger pieces of real estate—and this is where you come in.

The Communists grab people—and all the people.

No one is too small or insignificant, too young or too old, to be shackled and regimented or pauperized and destroyed. You are It—simply because you have two legs and walk upright. The Kremlin’s assembly line treats people exactly as the Ford assembly line handles metal parts of automobiles. Once the Stalinists thoroughly enslave a nation’s people they automatically get the real estate, most of the private real estate as well as the national. The Bolsheviks’ master plot is focused on everyone, everywhere. It aims to possess the earth’s people as well as the earth; step by step and region by region. By its all-encompassing timetable sooner or later it has to reach you.

This fact directly concerns the big mystery of the world’s greatest plot. Why should you or I, or any citizen of a free country, imagine that we are somehow peculiarly immune? Why should we assume that the Communist slave state cannot finally engulf us? No Western peoples are more patriotic, more courageous or more staunchly individualistic than the East Europeans have proved themselves to be in scores of wars over a score of centuries. None had greater love of freedom, nor greater desire for democratic self-government, than they had as World War II ended. Nevertheless they were swallowed by a boa constrictor possessed of consummate guile and insatiable appetite. When the Soviets swallowed up 90 million people in a flicker of time they demonstrated convincingly that they know how to eat their way around the earth. They need only more time and propitious circumstance—plus the continued complacency of their prospective victims. They are exploiting time. They are experts at creating the necessary circumstances. And they have as their chief ally the blind complacency of legions of free Western citizens, wrapped in delusions of geographical immunity.

But the Russians now control one-third of the earth, more than one-third of its population, and are organizing the collective resources of some 800 million people to a formidable degree. Everywhere under their rule they are arming and militarizing people. Most intensively of all they are arming and militarizing half of Europe. They are welding the satellite armies of Eastern Europe into new instruments of very serious potential aggressive power. They are building these armies so fast that they more than counterbalance the Atlantic Pact defense forces in Western Europe in manpower; are already much more integrated, and are definitely superior in some kinds of weapons and training. So the Soviet Russian armies still stand virtually undiminished in strength, with some 175 to 200 divisions available to them for combat in the West. The great gap between the free West’s combat forces in being and the Soviet East’s armed forces in readiness is barely beginning to be reduced, painfully and slowly. At this exact juncture the free nations of the West enter:

The period of greatest danger—1952 to 1954.

This is true not merely because Marshal Tito has warned that 1952 constitutes “the danger point.” It is true for reasons as obvious to every Western military authority as to Yugoslavia’s war-experienced leader. Because of the Soviet-satellite coalition’s temporary but grave preponderance of armed power on the ground and in the air. Because Moscow can already use, whether in combat or for other purposes, approximately three and a half million satellite men under arms. Because N.A.T.O.’s Army of Western Europe must remain seriously inferior in strength and weapons throughout 1952, and most of 1953. In short, because these years must inevitably be a period of unique aggressive temptation to the Kremlin. If the Soviets are to seize Western Europe by force, their only real chance will exist in the period which will expire late in 1953 or early in 1954.

I do not mean for a moment that war with Soviet Russia is inevitable. America’s vast superiority in atomic bombs and long-range planes with which to deliver them should logically continue to be a potent deterrent, unless the men in the Kremlin are mad. America’s startling progress in the perfection of tactical atomic weapons, for direct use against land armies, may eventually be able to save the world from catastrophe. Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, describes these developments as “a revolution in deterring power.” But this deterring power, in terms of important quantities of new weapons immediately available, lies several years in the future. It is in this present interim that, by recognition of our most responsible leaders, anything may happen—indeed, may be most likely to happen.

We can be certain of very little. But if war does come, we can be sure that no one can now predict accurately what it would do to all of us. We can also be sure about this. The men in the Kremlin, so long as they live, will never again have so much temptation to armed aggression as during the eighteen to twenty-four months which date from the late spring of 1952. This is the “danger point”—because this is the period when they might most easily, or most desperately, miscalculate an enormous risk. They are likewise committed to the “certain destruction” of Yugoslavia’s heretical Communist régime—the most dangerous menace to Kremlin domination of Communist parties in all foreign lands. The satellites’ armies could be used, à la Korea, to eliminate Titoism while Soviet Russia again maintained a studied pose of “neutrality.”

We are brought back sharply to the mounting threat of sovietized Eastern Europe. Moscow is now in a position to provoke another world war over Yugoslavia, to adventure in Iran and much of Asia, to menace Western Europe with an early blitzkrieg conquest—precisely because she has communized and militarized the satellite nations so rapidly and to such an alarming degree. Because its hold on Eastern Europe is physically absolute, the Kremlin is at last in position to blackmail free Europe and the world. By consolidating Soviet rule to the western edge of the Iron Curtain the Russians are entrenched in forward posts of inestimable strategic value. Behind these advanced lines they are mobilizing all of Eastern Europe’s human and material resources, against many obstacles, but with remarkable speed. The mobilized power of satellite Europe is the spearhead for Moscow’s ultimate employment of Soviet aggressive power. Without a sovietized, mobilized Eastern Europe the Russians could not challenge the West or fight a war with the West. In reality, the United States is spending at the rate of some $70 billion or more per year for defense purposes primarily because of what the Soviets have accomplished in the satellite countries, and of what they are now energetically pushing toward completion there.

This means that certain things are equally true for the citizens of all the Western democracies. Our common fears and uncertainties, the higher prices and ever heavier taxes we pay, the shrinkage of goods and pleasures we can afford, the gradual decrease in our standards of living—all are directly linked to Russia’s progress in sovietizing Eastern Europe. We pay an extremely high financial, material and psychological price for Russia’s absorption of these tragic lands. But above all the Communists’ conquest of satellite Europe is a warning to the West.

This is how Soviet Communism infiltrates and undermines; how it betrays and contaminates; how it dominates people, governments and all forms of administrative machinery; how it enslaves and destroys people; how it organizes every aspect of society; how it perverts patriotism, family loyalty, personal integrity and morality; how it cripples minds and poisons hearts; how it harnesses all of a nation’s human and material resources to the purposes of slave-state power. This is how Stalinism expands, conquers and perpetuates itself.

But exactly how do the Communists accomplish all these things?

Strangely enough, the how of Soviet conquest remains perhaps the least reported, certainly the least studied and least understood phenomenon of our times. It must be examined where and as the Kremlin’s plotters operate—sector by sector. The place to begin is where the Communists themselves always begin—with the armed forces and the secret police, the sources of absolute power.

footnote:

1. As published in 1948 in Kommunist, official organ of the Yugoslav Communist Central Committee, along with other documents concerning their seizure of power.