These words come from a gentle, white-haired old man, in his youth the confidant to a dictator who butchered 10 million of his countrymen. In East Germany, for example, Germans held authority over such areas as health and education, while Stalinists ran the military and police. The Soviet Union would have exported communism into Western Europe had not Social Democrats won elections in countries such as France. But Stalin kept his focus eastward, on China. When Mao Tse-Tung and Stalin finally meet, an angry Mao confronts Stalin about attempts to undermine him.
Victory is everything.
Indeed, into the 1950s, the communist mission appeared to be gaining ground. In Asian nations such as Burma, in Africa's Ethiopia and Mozambique, and in Vietnam, the fires of communism burned brightly. In the 1970s the Soviets even succeeded in defeating attempts by then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter to build a neutron bomb, which would have laid waste to the Soviet's superior armored weapons. But deceit was at the service of the communist mission. All rights reserved.