The logic was not fundamentally different from the case of Grenada or Guatemala, though the scale of the problem surely was. Bolshevik Russia was "radical nationalist." It was "Communist" in the technical sense, unwilling "to complement the industrial economies of the West"; in contrast, it was not in the least "Communist" or "socialist" in the literal sense of these terms, socialist elements of the pre-revolutionary period having been quickly demolished. Furthermore, though no conceivable military threat, the Bolshevik example had undeniable appeal elsewhere in the Third World. Its "very existence...constituted a nightmare" to US policymakers, Melvyn Leffler observes: "Here was a totalitarian country with a revolutionary ideology that had great appeal to Third World peoples bent on throwing off Western rule and making rapid economic progress." US and British officials feared that the appeal extended to the core industrial countries, as discussed earlier.

The Soviet Union was, in short, a gigantic "rotten apple." Adopting the basic logic and rhetoric of the North-South conflict, one may therefore justify the Western invasion after the revolution as a defensive action "in response to a profound and potentially far-reaching intervention by the new Soviet government in the internal affairs, not just of the West, but of virtually every country in the world," namely, "the Revolution's challenge...to the very survival of the capitalist order." "The security of the United States" was "in danger" already in 1917, not just in 1950, and intervention was therefore entirely warranted in defense against the change of the social order in Russia and the announcement of revolutionary intentions (diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis; my emphasis).²

The "rapid economic growth" aroused particular attention in the South -- and corresponding concerns among Western policymakers. In his 1952 study of late development, Alexander Gerschenkron describes the "approximate sixfold increase in the volume of industrial output" as "the greatest and the longest [spurt of industrialization] in the history of the country's industrial development," though this "great industrial transformation engineered by the Soviet government" had "a remote, if any" relation to "Marxian ideology, or any socialist ideology for that matter"; and was, of course, carried out at extraordinary human cost. In his studies 10 years later of long-term trends in economic development, Simon Kuznets listed Russia among the countries with the highest rate of growth of per capita product, along with Japan and Sweden, with the US -- having started from a far higher peak -- in the middle range over a century, slightly above England.³

The ultranationalist threat was greatly enhanced after Russia's leading role in defeating Hitler left it in control of Eastern and parts of Central Europe, separating these regions too from the domains of Western control. The rotten apple was so huge -- and after World War II, so militarily powerful as well -- and the virus it was spreading so dangerous, that this particular facet of the North-South conflict took on a life of its own from the outset. Long before Lenin and Trotsky took power, the threat of "Communism" and "anarchism" had regularly been invoked by the business-government-press complex to justify the violent suppression of attempts by working people to organize and to gain elementary rights. The Wilson Administration was able to extend these techniques, exploiting the Bolshevik takeover as an opportunity to crush the labor movement and independent thought, with the backing of the press and business community; the pattern has been standard since. The October revolution also provided the framework for Third World intervention, which became "defense against Communist aggression," whatever the facts might be. Avid US support for Mussolini from his 1922 March on Rome, later support for Hitler, was based on the doctrine that Fascism and Nazism were understandable, if sometimes extreme, reactions to the far more deadly Bolshevik threat -- a threat that was internal, of course; no one thought the Red Army was on the march. Similarly, the US had to invade Nicaragua to protect it from Bolshevik Mexico, and 50 years later, to attack Nicaragua to protect Mexico from Nicaraguan Bolshevism. The supple character of ideology is a wonder to behold.

Facts are commonly reshaped to establish that some intended target of attack is an outpost of the Kremlin (later, Peiping). On deciding in 1950 to support France's effort to quell the threat of independent nationalism in Vietnam, Washington assigned to the intelligence services the task of demonstrating that Ho Chi Minh was a puppet of Moscow or Peiping (either would do). Despite diligent efforts, evidence of "Kremlin-directed conspiracy" could be found "in virtually all countries except Vietnam," which appeared to be "an anomaly." Nor could links with China be detected. The natural conclusion was that Moscow considers the Viet Minh "sufficiently loyal to be trusted to determine their day-to-day policy without supervision." Lack of contact therefore proves the enormity of the designs of the Evil Empire. There are numerous other examples.

A variant is illustrated by the case of Guatemala. As the US prepared to overthrow its government, an Embassy officer advised that a planned OAS resolution to bar arms and Communist agents would "enable us to stop ships including our own to such an extent that it will disrupt Guatemala's economy," thus leading to a pro-US coup or increased Communist influence, which would in turn "justify...the U.S. to take strong measures," unilaterally if necessary. In accord with such reasoning, a routine foreign policy procedure is to use embargo, terror, and the threat of greater violence to compel the target to turn to the Russians for support, thus revealing itself to be a tentacle of the Soviet conspiracy, reaching out to strangle us. The technique was used against Guatemala and Nicaragua with extreme clumsiness, but great success in a highly conformist intellectual culture.⁴

² Leffler, Preponderance, 359. Gaddis, Long Peace, 10.

³ Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, 146, 150. Du Boff, Accumulation, 176, citing Kuznets.

⁴ See FRS, 51-2, for details on Indochina. Wood, 177, on Guatemala; US and Fascism-Nazism, Mexico, DD, chs. 1.3-4, 11. Sklar, Washington's War, and a substantial further literature on Nicaragua.