Revolution, fear and power: The unseen threads connecting Stalin’s Russia to modern America

America’s rightwing billionaires are freaked out about communism and, in their paranoia, they are funding and encouraging the rise of a form of fascism that will eventually turn on them, too. Will they wake up in time?

Louise and I just finished watching the extraordinary Showtime series, A Gentleman in Moscow, which takes place in the years and decades immediately after the Russian Revolution of 1917. A wealthy aristocrat (he was a count) is basically imprisoned in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow and has a front-row seat to observe how the well-intentioned revolt against the excesses of the Romanov dynasty turned into a brutal dictatorship, ultimately headed by a sociopathic Joseph Stalin. The banality of evil.

It flashed me back to the 1960s and a number of conversations I had as a young teenager with my father and heard on TV shows that we watched together like those moderated by William F. Buckley Jr. and Joe Pyne. The fear those days was that Soviet-style communists were plotting to take over America, confiscate all the wealth from the morbidly rich, and then line them up against a wall and shoot them as Lenin and his followers had done in Russia.

It was a fear that, at the time, seemed rational to many Americans.

Fred Koch, the founder of the Koch dynasty, had made his first big money “building refineries, training Communist engineers, and laying down the foundation of Soviet oil infrastructure” for Stalin. He saw up close and personal how violent the USSR really was, and apparently never forgot it.

Koch Industries — and thus the Tea Party and the best of today’s Republican infrastructure — would never have happened were it not for the money Stalin gave Fred Koch for his services. Neither would the John Birch Society, which Koch heavily funded in the wake of the “communist” Brown v Board Supreme Court decision, have ever acquired the influence it did.

The Republican Party fully embraced anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s in a misplaced effort to regain political power after being shattered by the Republican Great Depression. Republican rule (and Harding’s massive tax cuts) during the 1920-1932 era led directly to the Great Crash and everybody back then knew it; the GOP didn’t regain serious control of Congress until the 1990s, when most who could have remembered were dead.

Republican Senator Joe McCarthy led the charge in the 1950s, warning America that “communists” had infiltrated the Army and the State Department and were preparing to take over our country on behalf of Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.

When I was 13, my father gave me a just-published book he’d gotten from a friend in the John Birch Society titled None Dare Call It Treason. A major national bestseller and political bible for Republicans and Birchers, it posited that the US State Department was riddled with communist sympathizers, largely based on circumstantial evidence and the “investigations” conducted a decade earlier by Senator Joe McCarthy.

There was no such conspiracy: the failures of communism were becoming evident, and Americans who publicly proclaimed the need for Soviet-style communism in the United States were few and far between.

But that didn’t stop the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, from frequently and loudly suggesting to the press that there were millions of American communists just waiting to be activated by the right leader. It was one of his favorite ways to label, target, and disempower people like Martin Luther King Jr. and union leaders who were simply petitioning for civil or workers’ rights.

While today there may still be a few actual advocates of Soviet-style communism in the US, to quote Eisenhower about rich rightwingers, “their numbers are small and they are stupid.” But that reality hasn’t stopped as many as a hundred of America’s roughly 800 billionaires from claiming — and probably sincerely believing — that calls for social and economic justice really mean that one day liberals will rise up, come out about their secretly harbored communism, and do to the American rich what Lenin did to the wealthy in Russia in the second decade of the 20th century.

Their kneejerk reaction to progressive policies like high income taxes on the rich and strong social safety net policies for poor and working-class people has been to label those efforts as, essentially, early stage or camel’s-nose-under-the-tent communism. Out of that fear, they fund reactionary rightwing politicians like Trump and Johnson who promise to end the social safety net and keep their taxes below those of average working people.

This is an old model. Hitler rose to power promising to end the “threat of communism” in Germany: he went after communists before he went after Jews. As Pastor Niemöller famously wrote, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…”

Tragically, the result of the policies pushed by these reactionary, radical Republicans has been the opposite of what they say is their goal of stabilizing American society to ensure their own safety. Republican tax cuts have thrown the nation into over $34 trillion of debt, gutted the middle class, and produced a reactionary embrace of classical fascism as a solution to the crises of debt, offshoring jobs, and a lack of social and economic mobility.

Donald Trump is now promising to turn America into a “unified Reich.”

As Les Leopold brilliantly points out, the main result of the 1980s Republican (and, to some extent, Democratic) embrace of neoliberal policies — driven in large part by the billionaire Davos set — has been to destabilize the American working class and drive them into the arms of the racist and neofascist movement that rose up and took over the GOP with the Trump presidency.

In that regard, the billionaires funding the Trump movement, Project 2025, etc., are now working against their own best interest. While Republican tax cuts and deregulation have produced an explosion of wealth at the top, they’ve also produced wealth inequality that’s led to an armed insurrectionist movement that threatens the kind of social and political instability that actually could lead to a civil war and a resulting Lenin-style backlash against the rich.

Robert Reich points out:

“813 US billionaires control a record $5.7 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% of Americans control $3.7 trillion in wealth. When ~800 people control more wealth than half a country’s population, we have a very serious problem.”

In fact, the period from the end of WWII to the 1980s Reagan Revolution was one of the most stable — and successful — for American capitalism in our nation’s history. A top income tax bracket ranging from 91% to 74% that kicked in after a few million a year in today’s dollars, and clear laws against stock and wealth manipulation schemes like stock buybacks and private equity, caused a general and widely shared prosperity.

The working class grew in wealth at about the same rate as did the top one percent during that period before Reaganism gutted the union movement and thus the middle class; average workers with a good union job could buy a home and car, take an annual vacation, and put their kids through school with ease. When they reached old age, they had a good pension to supplement their Social Security, making retirement safe and comfortable.

That was, in fact, the story of my father, who spent his life working in a unionized tool and die shop in Lansing, Michigan. It was the story of every family I knew growing up in a working class neighborhood that was rapidly transitioning into a healthy middle class.

Nonetheless, Reagan and the billionaires financing him were convinced the union movement and calls to expand anti-poverty programs initiated by LBJ’s Great Society were the leading edge of a communist takeover that would ruin America and endanger the lives of the morbidly rich. The result of their paranoid policies is the social and economic wreckage of the middle class that drives today’s militia movements and is exploited by rightwing hate radio, Fox “News,” and similar outlets.

It’s not like we weren’t warned. Back in 1776, Adam Smith wrote in his remarkable tome on economics, The Wealth of Nations, exactly how rich people following their own greed inevitably destroy the very society from which they extract profits unless that society establishes strong guardrails to protect itself from them.

He argued that in “rich” countries — where the public good is well administered and there’s a more general prosperity — profits are ample to satisfy the business owners needs, but not excessive. When the rich seize control of most of the profits and wealth, however, and thus have the power to exploit society, he said, they always drive nations into poverty and ruin:

“But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.”

This year, America saw the highest level of corporate profit in the history of this country, and perhaps in the history of capitalism in developed countries worldwide.

A few sentences later, Smith elaborates:

“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this [wealthy] order [of men], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.
“It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

The simple reality is that markets, like traffic, work best when they’re appropriately well-regulated. The idea of a “free market” is as absurd as the idea of “free traffic” where everybody is welcome to ignore red lights, traffic lanes, and stop signs. It’s a rhetorical device designed to make average Americans accept changes in the rules regulating capitalism that will benefit the profits of the top one percent and nobody else.

And it’s killing us.

The European, Asian, and Canadian experience of the past 80 years or so has shown that strong union movements, a healthy social safety net (Medicare for All, free or inexpensive college, support for the deeply poor), and legislatures that answer to voters instead of donors (with strict regulation of money in politics) almost always produce general prosperity and social stability.

It’s why the “socialist” nations of Scandinavia — with the strongest union movements, highest income taxes on the rich, and most all-inclusive social safety nets — consistently rate among the happiest nations in the world. None are considering flipping into the Soviet model that fills the nightmares of so many of America’s rightwing billionaires.

While the rise of authoritarianism in post-revolutionary Russia is usually posited as a warning against communism’s forcible redistribution of wealth, in fact it’s a warning against any sort of authoritarianism. It proves that both the extreme left and the extreme right — communists and fascists — must embrace violence and terror to impose their will on a nation’s people.

In that regard, America’s billionaires — along with the rest of us — should be every bit as frightened of the avatars of fascism like Trump, Bannon, and Orbán as they are of the ghosts of the long-dead USSR.

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