Mindful of Voltaire’s dictum (“To hold a pen is to be at war”), we take up the pen against five…

The most respected academic authority on the Russian Revolution, 20thcentury communism, and the Cold War has died. He was Richard…

In 1972, Charles Cole was a 20-something American embarking on an ideological odyssey: a tour of duty through the USSR as a Russian-speaking guide for a cultural-exchange exhibit sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency. Trained at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Cole jumped at the chance to serve his nation abroad with his skills. These exhibits were powerful in educating Soviet citizens about the freedoms in America that their totalitarian government lied about unceasingly. As for the U.S. government’s investment in this program, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that he couldn’t imagine a “better-leveraged” use of tax dollars.

Vladimir Lenin was said to have boasted that capitalists would give his communists the rope to hang them. The self-anointed…