by Paul Kengor
Gorbachev wrote that he had not only an “interest in Lenin's legacy” but a “thirst to know him.” The leader of the Soviet Union, sounding like Billy Graham talking about the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus Christ, explained that he and the rest of the Soviet leadership “draw inspiration from Lenin. Turning to him, and ‘reading’ his works each time in a new way.… Lenin could see further.”40 Gorbachev perceived in Lenin a source of almost infallible wisdom: “We have always learned, and continue to learn, from Lenin's creative approach.”41
Ronald Reagan was often accused of not having read Lenin's works. But Gorbachev's statements make one wonder: did Gorbachev really read Lenin? For Reagan undoubtedly understood Lenin better than did Gorbachev.
Take this example: “In the West,” protested Gorbachev, “Lenin is often portrayed as an advocate of authoritarian methods of administration. This is a sign of total ignorance of Lenin's ideas and of their deliberate distortion. In effect, according to Lenin, socialism and democracy are indivisible.”42
No, Gorbachev was guilty of distortion. He somehow transmogrified Vladimir Lenin into a liberal Democrat, a composite of Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In reality, Gorbachev had learned wrong, and was teaching wrongly. This is seen in another embarrassing statement he made in Perestroika, when he maintained, “More than once he [Lenin] spoke about the priority of interests common to all humanity over class interests.”43
No, that was not true, as can be seen from Lenin's famous 1920 remark, repeated often by Ronald Reagan, including in that first press conference.44
In sum, Gorbachev's remarks on Lenin were nonsense from start to finish. Lenin was a ruthless human being, not a saintly font of eternal wisdom.
Ronald Reagan had Lenin right. Gorbachev had Lenin wrong. But the media protested only the former, not the latter. Once again, the American Left had found its target for ridicule and condemnation in the anti-Communist, not in the Leninist.
The Soviets Sense an Opening—
and the New York Times Steps In
Well into Reagan's presidency the Soviet Communists continued to use Reagan's forceful rhetoric as a propaganda opportunity—and they continued to count on American liberals to help them make political hay against the president.
Moscow's ongoing propaganda strategy is evident from a secret 1985 document issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The committee's secret memorandum, marked “Not for Publication,” was dated September 25, 1985, and titled “On the Hostile Speeches of the President of the U.S.A.”45 (See page 384).
Signed by the chief of the Propaganda Department and the chief of the Department of Foreign Political Propaganda, the memorandum claimed that Reagan had “frequently resorted to falsified quotes, attributing them to V.I. Lenin.” The American president had already “done this in the past, but now this is becoming standard practice.” The Soviet press had often “rebuffed strongly the slanderous attacks of R. Reagan, but nevertheless, this line [of speech] by the head of the White House continues.”
The two propaganda chiefs instructed the Soviet Foreign Ministry, via the Soviet embassy in Washington, “to categorically protest to the U.S. Department of State the falsifying of the works of the founder of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet state, V.I. Lenin.” The propagandists angrily insisted: “We demand the American administration end such antagonistic attacks against the Soviet Union and the gross falsification of Lenin's works.”
Interestingly, the Communist memo did not mention Reagan's use of “Nikolai Lenin.”46 Instead, it took aim at a statement in which the president attributed to Lenin plans to spread Communism to Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, and finally the United States—the last of which, according to Reagan, Lenin had said would fall into Soviet hands like “overripe fruit.” Reagan had said this more than once, and at least twice in September 1985 alone.47
Two weeks after the Moscow propaganda chiefs sent orders to the Foreign Ministry and the Soviet embassy to contest the quote in the United States, the most influential newspaper in the English-speaking world, the New York Times, took Reagan to task for his latest Lenin comments. The Times ran an editorial on the subject on October 8, 1985. It is, of course, impossible to say how and where the Times got the cue to respond as it did. Had the paper simply reacted to what Reagan had said about Lenin? Or had it swallowed the bait that the Soviets had dropped into the water in that September 25 memo? For example, had the Times been prompted by a leak from a friendly source at the U.S. State Department, which Moscow had ordered the Soviet embassy to target? Whatever the case, the Soviets got what they wanted: a high-profile denunciation of Reagan for “falsifying” Lenin's arguments.
The October 8 New York Times editorial was unusual in that it carried a byline; the Times usually runs unsigned editorials. The author was Karl E. Meyer, one of the members of the Times’s editorial board.48 He found it incredible that Vladimir Lenin might have said that after the Bolsheviks took Europe and Asia, America would be next.
Meyer set out to verify the alleged Lenin quote Reagan had used, that America would “fall into our outstretched hands like overripe fruit.” The first source the editorial cited was the Soviet propagandist Georgi Arbatov, who, Meyer informed readers, denounced the “overripe fruit” line, saying that Reagan had picked it up from no less than Hitler and his Nazis. Meyer described Arbatov only as a “Soviet official,” mentioning nothing about the fact that this was a full-time, paid propagandist for the Kremlin—and hence patently unreliable.
More respectably, Meyer considered television commentator Alistair Cooke, who suggested that the president may have gotten the line “from an old movie script.”49 Next the Times editorialist went to “researchers” at the Library of Congress, who apparently had no luck confirming Reagan's fanciful musing.
Then Meyer said that a Times colleague recalled having heard the line employed by “right-wing generals in Pretoria”—in other words, by white, racist apartheid leaders in South Africa. These racists had reportedly exhumed the fictitious phrase from a 1971 conspiracy tract “avidly read by members of the John Birch Society.”
With that, Meyer was on a roll. He dug some more, he told readers, until he found “what seems to have been President Reagan's source,” The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, published in 1958 by Robert Welch, the founder of that far-right organization known for its wild anti-Communism.
“So there it is,” Meyer concluded, “an undocumentable Birchite ‘paraphrase’ offered … as a live quotation by a President of the United States.”50
It was a damning piece. Unfortunately for the New York Times, Meyer was guilty of precisely what he was accusing Reagan of doing: making assumptions without documentation. Reagan had indeed used a questionable quote, which is no small matter; an American president is—and should be—held to a high standard of accuracy. That said, what Meyer alleged was, overall, less accurate than what Reagan said.
Lenin's use of the phrase “overripe fruit” has not been fully substantiated, though it had been in circulation for decades, sometimes linked to other Soviet figures.51 Most notably, the “overripe fruit” quotation has been attributed, credibly, to one of Lenin's successors, Nikita Khrushchev. During the Soviet leader's historic September 1959 visit to the United States, President Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, hosted Khrushchev for a half day. Benson later recalled of his time with Khrushchev: “As we talked face-to-face, he indicated that my grandchildren would live under Communism … [and] arrogantly declared, in substance: You Americans are so gullible.… We won't have to fight you. We'll so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.”52
Khrushchev's comment—which went unmentioned in the New York Times editorial—was entirely consistent with Marxist-Leninist doctrine. And that is the more important point regarding Reagan's comment: the thrust of what the president was claiming—namely, that Lenin outlined C
ommunism's global ambitions, and that he wanted America to be Communist as well—was completely accurate, as any honest observer with the slightest bit of knowledge on Lenin would have known.
Recall Lenin's August 1918 open letter to American workers, published in Pravda. In it he spoke of “the inevitability of world revolution” and said that in such a revolution American workers “will be with us, for civil war against the bourgeoisie.” The Bolsheviks, Lenin said, “are in a besieged fortress until other armies of the world socialist revolution come to our aid”—and as his letter made clear, an American army would most certainly join the “invincible” proletarian revolution.53
Likewise, in November 1918, Lenin emphasized that “Anglo-French and American imperialism” stood in the way of “world-wide Bolshevism” and “worldwide socialist revolution.” The Soviet system, he vowed, must “conquer” in “every advanced country in the world,” especially the United States, since “Anglo- American imperialism” threatened to “strangle” the great Russian experiment.54
These comments were typical of Lenin's militaristic language. His blunt calls for revolution in America, for the American proletariat to rise up against the “capitalist sharks” and “bloodsuckers” and “modern slave-owners,” were actually far more militant than what Reagan had attributed to him with the “overripe fruit” line. The Soviet propagandists may have insisted that Reagan was guilty of “gross falsification” of Lenin's views—and the New York Times may have scoffed at the idea that the Soviets had such expansionary aims—but Reagan was quite correct that from the outset, the Soviets had trumpeted their global objectives.
The New York Times’s Karl Meyer was seemingly unaware of this background, or else he chose to omit it from his editorial. Instead he concluded that Reagan had culled the “overripe fruit” quote from a John Birch Society publication, a contention for which he had no proof. An examination of Reagan's conservative background should have raised serious doubts that he would read, let alone favorably cite, Birch literature. Reagan was an avid reader of conservative sources who stood firmly against the Birch Society, such as William F. Buckley Jr.’ s National Review, which had sought to purge Birchers from the conservative movement.55 Reagan's anti-Communism was informed by sophisticated anti-Communist writers such as Frank Meyer, James Burnham, and Whittaker Chambers—all ex-Communists—plus Malcolm Muggeridge, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Wilhelm Röpke, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, Frederic Bastiat, Russell Kirk, and lesser-known authors like Laurence Beilenson,56 the Harvard-educated student of Harold Laski and Felix Frankfurter, whom Reagan read closely and corresponded with frequently.57
For liberals in the press, however, the caricature of Reagan as an ignorant anti-Communist was apparently irresistible. Thus the New York Times could cite, uncritically, a Soviet hatchet man like Georgi Arbatov pointing to Nazis as the source for the president's statement.
Had Meyer and the expert researchers dug a little deeper, perhaps in the archives of the Times’s chief competitor, the Washington Post, they might have found a June 26, 1955, article in which another leader, South Korean president Syngman Rhee, also invoked the “overripe fruit” quote. Rhee had seen international Communism divide his homeland with a horrendous war, and now he warned that the Communists were ready to attack the United States. As the Post reported, “The President [Rhee] pointed out that Lenin had laid down the following master plan for world conquest: ‘First we will take eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia. After that we shall surround and undermine the United States, the last citadel of capitalism, which will fall into our lap like an overripe fruit, without a struggle.’”58
That warning, in a major American newspaper, came three years before the publication of the obscure John Birch tract Meyer cited as the source of Reagan's quote.
Calling the Soviets’ Bluff
For the Soviets, the New York Times editorial was quite a coup. The Gray Lady served as a feeder service to newspapers and news broadcasts all over America and across the world. The Times article, on the heels of others like the Washington Post piece, must have reinforced Kremlin hopes that the American media could aid the USSR in its campaign to discredit the president who was committed to undermining Marxist-Leninist ideology.
In 1987 the Soviet regime continued its efforts to discredit Reagan, this time working behind the scenes to try to pressure the U.S. government. That spring, Valentin Falin, another dedicated Soviet government propagandist, came to Washington with a Soviet delegation to meet with American officials, including Charlie Wick of USIA. Wick also brought along his top researcher, Herb Romerstein, expecting that Falin might pull some kind of stunt. The Soviet propagandist did not disappoint.
Falin came armed with the same material that the New York Times and Washington Post had been using against Reagan. He started in on the American president's use of “Nikolai” and the “promises are like pie crust, made to be broken” quotation. Like Georgi Arbatov before him, Falin said that Reagan was citing not Lenin but the Nazis. The inauthentic quote, he said, originated in German wartime propaganda circulated by Joseph Goebbels.
Unfortunately for Falin, he was not sitting across the table from sympathetic American journalists who held Ronald Reagan in equal disregard. As Falin began railing against the supposedly spurious “pie crust” quote, Wick turned to Romerstein and ordered, “Answer him.” Romerstein was ready, opening a large copy of Lenin's Collected Works, where the quote resided. Romerstein read the quote aloud.59
The Soviets’ bluff had been called. A stammering Falin turned red, and leaned on one of his cronies for a stammering response. It was not a good moment for the masters of agitprop. That was especially so because Romerstein had put Falin and his comrades in their place in front of an audience of government officials and specialists from both sides. It was a small victory for the USIA and the Reagan administration in general.
Of course, Falin and his team's setback had occurred behind closed doors, without journalists there to report it. The Soviets would continue their propaganda campaign against Ronald Reagan, and America's monolithic media would continue to unwittingly support the effort.60
Cashing In: Zorin and the Soviets Confront Reagan
After Falin faltered in charging the Reagan administration with “misquoting” Lenin and making “vulgar” accusations of Soviet expansionism,61 the Kremlin dispatched another propagandist to the United States, this time to confront President Reagan directly.
Valentin Zorin was the Soviet “journalist” called on for this task. Zorin was a regular on Studio 9, the Soviet Union's premier “news” show, and he wrote for both Pravda and Izvestia. He displayed religious-like devotion to totalitarian Communism. Fellow Soviet official Genrikh Trofimenko, the director of the influential Institute for U.S.A. and Canada Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, later described Zorin as a “faithful follower of Lenin's dictum regarding morality” who would happily contrive “any” information necessary—including “slander”—to discredit what Zorin termed “American warmongers.” Trofimenko condemned Zorin as a “mini-Goebbels” who had spent his “whole life … devoted to piling on the United States heap upon heap of unspeakable dirt and, pardon me, dung.”62
From his perch on Studio 9, Zorin—along with other propagandists like Vitaly Kobysh, Yevgeny Velikhov, Falin, and Arbatov—nightly took aim at President Reagan. Zorin had been trashing Reagan ever since the American had emerged as a serious presidential candidate in the 1970s. For example, in a February 16, 1976, statement issued by the Moscow Domestic Service, Zorin attacked Reagan for criticizing détente, saying that the candidate had demonstrated “complete irresponsibility” and was seeking to “poison the atmosphere.”63 Once Reagan was in the White House, Zorin ridiculed the American president as a lazy, dimwitted, addled, aged ex-actor, as a “blockhead” who “does not care to think.”64
Zorin was especially outraged by President Reagan's June 1987 call to tear down the Berlin Wall. On Studi
o 9, he, Arbatov, and Falin teed off on the president, accusing the “American cowboy” of “slander,” “blackmail,” and “vulgar demagoguery.”65 Zorin often denounced Reagan for supporting those struggling for human freedom. He blamed Reagan for developments toward democracy in Poland, and he angrily attacked the American president when Reagan prevented Grenada from becoming a Cuban-Soviet proxy dictatorship. In fact, he assailed the invasion of Grenada in mocking language strikingly similar to that used by Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator John Kerry, Jesse Jackson, Walter Mondale, Madeleine Albright, and the editorial pages of the New York Times.66
On May 20, 1988, shortly before Reagan's summit with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, Zorin got his big opportunity: he and fellow “journalist” Boris Kalyagin went to the White House to interview the president for Soviet television.67
Sure enough, Zorin and Kalygin took Reagan to task for his “allegation” that Lenin and Soviet Communists had “expansionistic aims.” They challenged Reagan on the sources, saying that “Soviet specialists,” the “U.S. press,” and “people who work in the Library of Congress” had “studied all of the compositions of Lenin's” but hadn't “found one similar quotation or anything that's even close to some of those quotations.” No doubt by “U.S. press” they meant, among other outlets, the Washington Post and New York Times, whose aforementioned articles had cited a generic category of Soviet specialists and, in the case of Karl Meyer's Times editorial, researchers from the Library of Congress. Notably, Zorin and his partner did not argue whether Lenin ever said anything expansionary. Instead, the well-prepared apparatchiks said only that people in the U.S. media and at the Library of Congress had searched for such quotes but could not find them. Zorin was a prodigious reader of American newspapers; it is clear that the U.S. media had supplied the Soviets with the sources they needed to indict Reagan.68