The 'Communist' Hoax

The first unaccompanied American pilots to fly into Russia during WWII didn’t know what to expect. They were sheepishly pulled aside by briefing officers, who told them that the flight maps they had would be of little use, and asked them to note any landmarks they saw on the way so that the mapping could be improved.

After entering Russian territory, the pilots drifted off their course to gawk at the ruins of towns as they came over the horizon. They had never seen such devastation. Entire cities hammered to dust by the Germans, as well as Russia’s own ‘scorched earth’ policy. They had flown thousands of kilometers, deep into the country’s heartland, realizing something else. They had not seen a single road.

The railroad and the Manych canal were there, but little else in the way of transportation infrastructure, save for horse trails and paths for agricultural vehicles. Russia would now have to recover from a brutal war with a stunted economy. The lack of a modern road network to aid this effort would put significant constraints on their growth.

A few years later therefore, when the spectre of the ‘communist bogeyman’ was sweeping America, it was obvious to those who knew better that the danger had to be founded on the possibility of Russia developing the atom bomb, rather than any potential Russian threat to the United States. 

The outcome was panic nonetheless. A play on the emotions of Americans in order to create the image of the ‘Russian monster’. That flawed premise lingered for decades, and became the foundation on which a looming cold war propaganda machine was built.

-RG

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