butchers, the bakers or the candlestick makers—–the builders.  Notice this too: The words Jesus employs in this passage come initially from the prophet Isaiah several centuries earlier, demonstrating even more graphically that the stupidity of the expert is a fact of long standing.  We ignore it at our peril.
            Or, if you prefer a more modern reference, William F. Buckley, Jr. once said that he’d rather be ruled by the first fifty names in the Boston telephone directory than by the entire faculty of Harvard.
            Given human depravity and human ignorance, the path of highest wisdom entails preservation of the moral, economic and political traditions of our ancestors.  You must not trust your future to someone who ignores your past.  A policy or law will not treat your grandchildren well if it mistrusts or maligns your grandparents.  Never mistake “modern” for “better.”  The old should be discarded slowly, if at all, because “new” is not necessarily the same as “improved.”
            In the pursuit of wise governance, we must not confuse the idea of “change” with the idea of “improvement,” because not all changes (perhaps very few of them) are changes for the better.  Most schemes for large-scale improvement introduce as many problems as they solve, a phenomenon we now recognize as “the principle of unintended consequences.”
            Reform is difficult, and it requires a delicate touch.  Most persons, certainly most governments, lack that necessary delicate touch.  Because governments lack that delicate touch, conservatives are those persons who conserve the established order against those who seek to undermine it or deform it.  This does not mean that conservatives oppose change.  They do not.  It means that conservatives distinguish between changes directed at developing or perfecting that which already is from changes designed to transform that which is into something it is not.  Conservatism does not oppose change, only changes that undermine the inherited principles of wisdom that grew up over decades, or even centuries.

            Slowly, over the last two thousand years and more, we have come better to understand what things are for, to understand that, despite their pretensions, governments cannot substitute for families, for churches, for communities, or for schools.  If you ignore that truth, you begin to think that evil lodges primarily in the world and its institutions, not in the human heart.  You begin to conclude that the failure of a government to educate its citizens, to provide for its poor, to care for its sick and aged, leads to crime, and that if you eliminate the inequalities in social institutions and classes that most of the evil in the world is therefore handled. 
            But it is not.
            Political theory based on speculation and mere good intention, rather than on principle and experience, is likely to fail because it lacks the necessary historical indicators required to establish the pedigree and prudence of a policy.  History and tradition teach us a number of important (and closely related) political lessons, most notably that both law and policy must be fortified by history and habit.
            Untoward consequences inevitably result from public policies that are not based upon observable reality and that have no identifiable, objective, historical indicators for their fundamental premises.  The study of history and tradition is in the truest sense an education and training for political life.  To make the point more personal: Imagine how many mistakes you would make if you had no memory.
            Where there are human beings, there are problems—always.  Indeed, the human beings themselves are often the problem.  We have seen the enemy, and he is us.  Human nature is resistant to improvement.  But political liberalism is undaunted by that fact.  Indeed liberalism is characterized not only by its belief or confidence that things can be changed for the better, but also by its insistence that even if we cannot be perfected, we and our condition can be dramatically improved by education, legislation, and alteration of environment.  I take that liberal confidence to be a denial of the Christian doctrine of human depravity and intractability, as if the main problem we face is human ignorance, not human wickedness.
            That assumption is dramatically unbiblical.

Successful Techniques for Seizing Power
by Dr. Fred C. Schwarz

The communist attempt to seize power through labor union control has not yet achieved complete victory for the Communist in any country.  In those countries where they have established their rule, the means employed have been quite different.  The methods by which they achieved power in Russia, China, and Czechoslovakia merit special study.  In each case they seized power utilizing deception, established themselves by violence, and maintained their dictatorship by totally enslaving helpless people.

RUSSIA
Revolution broke out in Russia in February, 1917.  The Czar was overthrown, and a republican order was established.  The declaration of a political amnesty brought into the open the various Russian revolutionary parties.  These parties were numerous, and the degree of their revolutionary fervor and devotion to violence varied considerably.
            The most moderate of these parties was the Constitutional Democratic Party known as the Cadets.  They favored the establishment of a Parliamentary Republic and change via the ballot.
            A second was the historic Russian revolutionary party, the Social Revolutionaries whose program was agrarian reform rather than industrial development.  The Social Revolutionaries were also called the populists because of their slogan, “to the people.”  Desiring to improve the lot of the peasants, young Russian intellectuals went out to the people with their revolutionary message.  They advocated land ownership by the peasants themselves.  They were not a Marxist Party and did not believe that Russia should follow the pathway of Capitalist development.  As their name indicates, they favored radical action and were addicted to violence.  Lenin attacked them frequently during his career.
            The anarchists were another significant group.  They were addicted to violence, assassination and sabotage, and had a long revolutionary tradition and a total contempt for governmental authority of every form.
            The Marxists were divided primarily into the

Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, the former being under the leadership of Lenin.  As has been related, the Bolsheviks became the Communists.
            Finally, there were various independent revolutionary groups, as well as individuals who owed allegiance to no party but were devotees of violent revolutionary action.
            These various parties set to work, organized, and published their newspapers.  They participated in common organizations known as the soviets.  The soviets were born in the 1905 Russian revolution when the historic technique of the mass strike had been tried and had failed.  The soviets were committees formed in strategic areas to direct the strike and the revolution.  They were called soviets of workers, soldiers and peasants’ deputies.  Their delegates were elected from the proletariat working in the factories, from the peasantry and from the ranks of the common soldiers and sailors.  They began as completely unofficial bodies.  The soviets were re-formed in the days of the Russian Republic after the overthrow of the Czar.  The Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries were well represented in these soviets.  The latter were divided into two groups, Left and Right.  The Bolsheviks were in a small minority in the first half of 1917.  The slogan at this time was, “All power to the soviets,” but Lenin, filled with a desire to seize complete power in Russia and aware that the soviets were far from being under Bolshevik control, was only halfhearted in his support of this slogan.
            Meanwhile, Russia was staggering under the blows of the 1914-1918 war.  Enormous losses had been suffered on their western front.  The soldiers, short of necessary weapons, were in a mutinous mood, while at home, the people were consumed by a desire for peace and for land.  Lenin, the dynamic Marxist who seized every opportunity to advance his cause, developed a program which promised peace and land.  Everywhere he agitated for the end of the war.  He urged the peasants to throw down their arms, return to their homes, and seize the fields of their landlords which, he said, were rightfully theirs.  The slogan, “Peace and land,” was very popular.
            In adopting such a program, Lenin had contravened all the accepted standards of Marxist doctrine.  Classical Marxist doctrine had been that private ownership of land was to be replaced by collective ownership.  Lenin utterly reversed this policy by promising land to everybody.  The other Marxist parties indignantly accused him of stealing the program of

the Social Revolutionaries.  This is exactly what he had done, brazenly and shamelessly.  Lenin was a dynamic Marxist, a believer in the dialectic which, as we will see, allowed him complete freedom of action and policy.  If his goal of power should be achieved by doing the exact opposite of what he had long advocated, then that is what he should do.  The basic doctrine of Marxism-Leninism is: Come to power.  The Marxist-Leninist will promise whatever is necessary in order to achieve that end.  Lenin, therefore, promised peace and land.  But the gift of land was merely the bait that covered the barbed hook of Communist dictatorship.  It is interesting to notice in passing how Communist policy with regard to the ownership of land varied in the years that followed.  In 1917, Lenin gave the land to the peasants, but confiscated the crops when they were harvested.  The disgruntled farmers lost their enthusiasm and the harvest diminished.  The grain shortage became serious and a desperate famine arose.  In 1921, after four years of power, the Communists were on the verge of being overthrown.  To avert this, Lenin made a dramatic reversal in policy.  He re-established Capitalism.  He introduced the New Economic Policy which allowed private trading in grain.  Many of the Communists regarded this as a confession of utter defeat and some ideological extremists committed suicide on the streets.  But Lenin, regarding the situation in the light of the dialectic, saw it as a temporary withdrawal for future advance.
            During the period of the New Economic Policy, the farm produce of Russia increased, and the food situation improved greatly.  The Communists, meanwhile, were establishing their power in the cities.  By 1928, Stalin, who had succeeded Lenin, felt that they were strong enough to put their real program into operation.  He therefore reversed the New Economic Policy, and declared war on the peasants.  The most prosperous of the peasants, who were known as “kulaks,” were arrested, herded together, and deported to Siberia.  The slogan was, “Liquidation of the kulaks as a class.”  The kulaks were not landlords.  The landlords had been annihilated in 1917-18.  The kulaks were peasants who had farmed efficiently and employed labor on their farms.
            The kulaks’ land was made the basis of the collective farms to which the middle and poor peasants were urged to contribute their land and livestock.  These peasants, however, resisted attempts to make them join the collectives, preferring to work their own land.  When they were forced to join, many of them slaughtered their animals and a great famine rose in the land.
            In 1931 Stalin decided to teach the peasants a final lesson.  He took all the wheat from the Ukraine and dumped it down in Western Europe, leaving the Ukrainians to starve. During that fearful winter of 1931, it is reported seven million

starved to death.  Speaking at a meeting in California, I was informed by a young woman who had been a school child in Kiev in the Ukraine at that time that the game they had played on the way to school was counting the dead bodies in the streets.  In this manner, Stalin fulfilled Lenin’s policy of giving the land to the peasants long enough to consolidate Communist power as a prelude to taking it from them to establish collective ownership which had remained the real objective even while land was being distributed. 
            However, in mid 1917, all this was in the womb of the future.  The war against Germany dragged on, and the situation in Russia became worse.  The Bolsheviks gained in popularity through their “peace and land” program, and constantly increased their representation in the soviets by means of their magnificent organization.  In July, 1917, they organized a revolt, but it was ill-timed and unsuccessful, and Lenin was forced into hiding.  In October of that year, however, the Bolsheviks secured a small majority in the Petrograd Soviet.  Lenin decided that the hour of revolution had come, for they could now speak, not only in the name of the Communist Party, but in the name of the soviet which represented the entire working class.  The revolution was opposed by some of Lenin’s co-workers, particularly Zinoviev and Kamenev, but Lenin’s desires dominated, and the revolution was called by the soviet.  The Bolshevik-led revolutionaries marched on the Czar’s winter palace and arrested the provisional government which was in power until the election of a constituent assembly, and which included many Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries in its rank.
            The Bolsheviks did not have wide popular support.  The only group in the soviet to stand by them at that time was the left wing of the Social Revolutionary Party.  Bolshevism thus came to power with a tiny minority of the people, but they established their terror, and Lenin became the ruthless lord and master of Russia.
            In all rural areas peasants’ committees were formed.  These were composed largely of poor peasants and criminal elements.  Some were motivated by idealism, while others were motivated by hatred.  These aggressive peasant bodies became a key tool of Lenin’s reign of terror.  He encouraged them to seize the land, kill the landlords and divide the estates among themselves.  Frequently the letters ended thus: “Anyone who opposes this is to be shot without mercy.”
            Resistance to the Communist regime developed in every area of life.  The first group to revolt openly were the anarchists who were shot down mercilessly in the streets.  Following the anarchists, the Left Wing Social Revolutionaries revolted and met a similar fate.
            Confronted with such problems at home, the new

regime was faced with the necessity of ending the war against Germany.  When the Commander-in-Chief refused to obey the Communist order to lay down arms, Lenin and Stalin telephoned his dismissal and appointed a private as general of the army to conclude the surrender.
            Lenin realized that to remain in power he needed a fearful instrument of terror.  The Czar had always had a secret police force called the Okrana.  The Communists took it over, renamed it the Cheka, and refined and sharpened it into the most fearful instrument of terror the world has ever known.  Seeking for a man to head up this organization, Lenin found a remarkable young Polish Bolshevik named Dzerinski.  Born of wealthy, aristocratic parents, Dzerinski had, as a child, forsaken the comforts of his home to dedicate himself to the poor of the earth as a revolutionary organizer.  His teen-age years were largely spent in Polish prisons where his rule of conduct was that he, as the most enlightened and advanced, was duty bound to perform the most menial tasks.  He therefore insisted on cleaning the latrines of the other prisoners as an example of enlightenment and dedication. What better man could Lenin have found to serve as a selfless instrument of murder and extermination?  Motivated by his idealistic dedication, Dzerinski became the organizer of the red terror, and the master murderer of modern times.
            The story is told that one day as the Bolshevik leaders sat in conference, Lenin asked Dzerinski how many traitorous Social Revolutionaries they held in prison at that time.  Dzerinski replied that there were about fifteen hundred, whereupon Lenin asked for the list so that he might see which were old friends and supporters.  Having read the list, Lenin marked the corner of the sheet with a tiny cross.  Dzerinski took the sheet, noted the cross, looked at Lenin, and quietly left the room.  The following day he informed Lenin that the fifteen hundred had been executed.  The cross which Lenin had made to show that he had read the paper had been interpreted as an order for the execution of fifteen hundred people.  Lenin had merely intended to indicate that he had read the document.  On the misinterpretation of a doodle of Lenin’s pencil, fifteen hundred people went to their death.
            Communist power in Russia was consolidated by limitless, pitiless violence.  Lenin had said, “What does it matter if three quarters of the world perish provided the remaining quarter is Communist!”  Any act of terror was justified if it assured continuing Communist control.  Group by group, the opposing forces were liquidated until at last the impossible was achieved and the Communist Party held Russia in total enslavement.  When the Communist monster had devoured all other revolutionary groups it turned and destroyed most of its own creators.

Romerstein Documents Soviet Espionage in U.S.
by Jennifer G. Hickey

With the demise of the Soviet Union, communism fell into the dustbin of history and many Americans believed the chapter on U.S.-Soviet relations was closed.  In fact, the end of the Cold War required the rewriting of the history books as long-secret files were opened to expose the intensity of Cold War disinformation.  In 1995 new light was shed on the influence and extent of Soviet espionage with the revelation of the Venona documents.
            In February 1943, the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service began a program, code-named “Venona,” to break the Soviets’ code and monitor intercepted communications.  In his new book coauthored by Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets, Herbert Romerstein details the previously unknown influence and pervasive network of Soviet espionage during the 20th century.  No writer now living is better equipped for the job.
            Here is conclusive evidence confirming that J. Robert Oppenheimer gave Moscow U.S. atomic secrets, as long contended by the Manhattan Project’s Medford Evans, and validating the controversial revelations in the 1940s of former Soviet agents Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley.  And much more.
            Insight: Whenever the issue of Communist Party activity in the United States is raised, most Americans are conditioned to think of [former senator] Joe McCarthy and his Senate hearings.  Do we now know what the scope of Soviet influence was in the United States during this period?
            Herbert Romerstein: Well, to start, you should know that the McCarthy period lasted just one year.  But the U.S. government had believed for many years that the members of the Communist Party were totally dedicated to the Soviet Union, so anyone chosen for government work was supposed to be checked out.  And, as it develops, for good reason: We learned going through the Venona traffic, and when my wife and I went to the Moscow, Berlin and Prague archives, that almost every member of the Communist Party was a spy for the Soviet Union.
            Many of them, of course, were active within the U.S. government.  We know about Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenburg, but there were many others, and sometimes at high levels.  For instance, Harry Hopkins, friend and White House assistant to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was a Soviet spy.

            Insight: The history of communist activity in the United States focuses primarily on the 1950s and the immediate postwar era.  Is this the whole story?
            HR: No, indeed.  You have to go back to the 1920s for the first investigations into their movements.
            As war approached, there was a group called the American Peace Mobilization which actively was opposing any kind of U.S. support for the British during the Ribbentrop alliance between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin signed in August 1939 and right up to the Nazi invasion of Russia in June 1941.  Before that, as the Nazis and the communists had fought it out in the German streets and then through surrogates in Spain, the comrades had been antifascist and took in a lot of educated Americans and intellectuals.  These were regarded by the communists as people who could be sent into government and used for espionage.
            During the alliance period, many who had joined the [Communist] Party for anti-Nazi reasons had become so brainwashed that they dedicated themselves to whatever the Soviet Union wanted–even Stalin’s pact with Hitler.  For two years during that period they maintained that British imperialism was the problem and that Roosevelt was just an imperialist who wanted to get the U.S. into war.  But when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the antifascism reemerged.
            Soviet records confirm that the communists were very, very active in the atom bomb program, about which they learned early.  In fact, the records show that Stalin knew of the bomb project before Truman.
            Ironically, the records confirm that many of the nations that are problems for us now were trained to hate America by the Soviets.  Even Iraq, which hardly is a communist country, had its intelligence service trained by the KGB and received military support from the U.S.S.R.
            Insight: Gus Hall, the longtime leader of the Communist party USA, died in October.  Is the party itself dead?  And, if not, what remains of it?
            HR: The American Communist Party’s future is behind it.  According to the KGB there were at its height about 12,000 nominal members, but the true number was more like 4,000.  Today, there are certainly less than 1,000, if that, with many of them on Social Security.
            Insight: Many of the agents earlier in this century were ideologically drawn to the Soviet Union, while other spies, such as Aldrich Ames, since have been attracted for monetary or other nonideological reasons.  What effect does a spy’s motivation have on the ability to catch him?
            HR: There are a number of effects, some negative and some positive.  Mercenaries do not usually work with others or in a network–which makes them more difficult to track.  In the case of the John Walker spy ring, for example, which was almost all family, once one was arrested the rest quickly

turned in the others.  But ideologues will do almost anything to protect their comrades.  Just look at Julius and Ethel Rosenburg, who went to their deaths rather than reveal what they knew of the truth about the network of Soviet atom spies that evidence now shows reached all the way up to Robert Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty.  
            Insight: What role do espionage and counterintelligence play in the large national-security field today?
            HR: Espionage remains important, but remember that it has two faces.  There is the one side which is simply obtaining information some government feels it needs from us.  Then there is the other side of the coin, which involves gaining influence.  This is the element of spying in which the point is to put information or disinformation into the press or the government as a means of influencing U.S. public opinion or policy.  We see this with the Chinese, who have infiltrated our political system to promote the sale of our dual-use technologies.
            When it comes to technical secrets, if we are willing to let our guard down it doesn’t matter what the FBI does because America’s adversaries are going to get them.  As for disinformation and influencing the public, it is interesting to see how adversaries operate.  I spent six years at the U.S. Information Agency.  One day I was called by a Washington Post reporter who told me he had received a letter from me.  I said, “Oh, really.”  When I saw the letter, there were several [markers] that proved it was a forgery.  What came out of it in the end was a great story about Soviet espionage.
            Insight: There have been a number of cases of spying in recent years, the most prominent being the case of the Chinese allegedly stealing all the nuclear secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory.  What difference, if anything, does it make to have a Republican in the White House?
            HR: I don’t think you are likely to have the same kind of corruption in a Bush administration as you have had in the Clinton administration or would have in a Gore administration.  With that said, I think there are some in the GOP and even on the Bush team who have some illusions about the Chinese.
            Insight: As more books are written and more documents are released into the public square, do you think there will be a move away from the longtime romanticizing of the American communists?
            HR: We are seeing a change in some parts of academia.  At one time it was politically incorrect to say Alger Hiss was a communist, for instance, but the evidence now has become overwhelming.  There are some academics and others who never will learn, but it now is much harder for them to promote that idea.
            Insight, November 27, 2000, p. 37-38

Patriarch with a KGB Past?
by Arnold Beichman

Russia may have shut down access to Soviet archives but apparently there are still places where those archives are to be found, examined and made public.  One of these places is Estonia, a onetime Soviet state for a half-century.
            In August 1994, Russia removed its last remaining occupying troops and tanks from Estonia.  What apparently Russia didn’t remove were the KGB archives.  And a KGB file that has just been made public allegedly reveals that the present head of the Russian Orthodox Church, 70-year-old, white-bearded Patriarch Alexiy II of Moscow and of all Russia, was a “long-serving KGB agent and was even awarded the agency’s ‘Certificate of Honor.’ ”
            The report comes from the Keston Institute, an Anglican religious rights organization, located in Oxford, England, and was published in the Irish Times on Sept. 23.  One reason why the report appeared in an Irish daily is that Patriarch Alexiy II has adamantly opposed any visits by Pope John Paul II to the Russian Federation, a position supported by Russian President Putin.  No reigning pope has visited Moscow since the Great Schism of 1054 split the eastern and western branches of Christianity.
            The KGB papers describe the alleged activities of Patriarch Alexiy’s actions against orthodox clergy and believers.  His KGB code-name was “Agent Drozdov,” Russian for the bird thrush.  According to the archives, he was recruited by the Estonian branch of the KGB on Feb. 28, 1958, when he was known as Father Alexiy Ridiger.  Although born in then independent Estonia before World War II, Patriarch Alexiy is an ethnic Russian.  He served as an orthodox priest until he was seconded to Moscow during the Gorbachev era.
            Patriarch Alexiy has been a strong supporter of President Vladimir Putin, himself a KGB agent for 15 years.  The churchman has publicly defended Mr. Putin’s conduct of the war in Chechnya and his much criticized behavior in the aftermath of the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk.
            Despite earlier denials by a church spokesman, Father Vsevold Chaplin, the Keston Institute, which presses for religious freedom in the former communist bloc, said it had “reviewed all the available documentary evidence from the various archives of the KGB.”  Its conclusion: “Drozdov” and Patriarch Alexiy were the same individual since the personal

details given in the archive match those of no other priest of the Estonian diocese.
            There is nothing new in the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the czarist and Bolshevik regimes.  Richard Pipes, the Harvard historian, has written that “since the time of Peter the Great, the Russian Orthodox Church was to an extreme degree dependent on the state...The clergy were duty-bound to report to the police any information of conspiracies against the emperor or the government, including that obtained during confession.  They also had to denounce the appearance of suspicious strangers in their parishes.”
            Although the church had been persecuted under V.I. Lenin and Josef Stalin, World War II forced a reconciliation.  Stalin met with high church officials Sept. 4, 1943, and a deal was made.  High clergy were placed on the same footing as high state and party officials.  Churchmen were among the first to receive decorations after the war.
            According to the historians Mikhail Heller and Alexander Nekrich, the church became “an active ally of the Soviet government” in July 1926 following the arrest of Metropolitan Sergii as the Patriarch.  On his release in March 1927, he published a declaration of submission to the Bolshevik regime.
            Control over the church took the form of control over the clergy, from the patriarch to the humblest lay brother.  Admission to the three seminaries and church academies were strictly controlled.  Each candidate was selected by local committees of the KGB.  Seminaries had to listen to lectures such as “Lenin’s Teachings on Communist Morality and the Fundamental Principles of Moral Education.”
            The documents about Patriarch Alexiy in the Estonian State Archive are signed by the KGB chairman, Col. I.P. Karpov.  In one memorandum, he describes “Agent Drozdov” as providing “valuable material for the case underway against the priest Povedsky.”  He added:
            “After consolidating the agent’s experience in practical work with the organs of state security in the cultivation of agents, we intend also to use him in our interests by sending him to capitalist states as a member of church delegations.”
            KGB papers in the Moscow archive show “Drozdov” was sent to England in 1969 as part of a church delegation, that he and another agent were involved in “educational work” with monks in Psko in Western Russia in March 1983 and that he was sent on a mission to Portugal in 1985.

            The Washington Times, September 29, 2000 p. A17