In the geniuses Lenin and Trotzky, the Bolshevik movement found its leadership. Lenin had no use for democracy as it was known in America. To him it was a sham, a front for the great capitalist trusts, which—even though the capitalists themselves might not know it—were doomed to get bigger on a shrinking market, until international capitalist war, bankruptcy, and working-class revolution was the result. Lenin was as sure that this would happen as he was that the sun would rise the next morning. The only dispute was the matter of timing; a few Bolshevik pessimists thought that the capitalist world might last into the 1920's.
Such a frame of mind led to a very deadly kind of psychological warfare. The Bolsheviks despised their opponents, desiring to "liquidate" them (this meant breaking down a group and preventing its reforming as a group, but came above all to mean mass murder). They were so antagonistic to the "capitalist" world that they hated God, patriotism, national history, churches, money, private property, chastity, marriage, and verse that rhymed, all with equal intensity. Moscow became the Mecca for the eccentrics and malcontents of the world and for some years Russia was in fact looser in morals than any other civilized country.
Hatred for the capitalist world enabled the Bolsheviks to throw Russian Czarist patriotism into the discard. They delighted in getting Russian troops to desert at the front; the Germans delighted in this, too. But the Bolsheviks were certain they would have the last laugh because they knew it was only a matter of weeks or months before the revolution—the inevitable revolution, forecast by Karl Marx's peculiar economics—broke out in Germany as well. The Russian devil-may-care attitude toward all established forms of society was perfectly characterized by Trotzky's flip but deadly answer to the German military negotiators at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. When the Germans balked at some point, "All right," said Trotzky, "no war and—no peace."
The Germans insisted that if the Bolsheviks did not sign the dictated peace terms the German army would make more war.
Fine, said Trotzky in effect, he didn't mind. Go ahead and make war. It wouldn't worry him or his army. They would go somewhere else and would refuse to play games with capitalists.
This stopped the Germans in their tracks. They did not want to send their troops into a starving country that roared with subversive doctrines. They knew that while Trotzky wasted their time quibbling over negotiations, his printing presses worked night and day telling the German troops that the war was over, that capitalism was on its way out, that the workers' revolution was coming, everywhere, for everybody, with food, peace, plenty, atheism and all the other delights of the good Bolshevik life. The Russians finally signed the surrender treaty but in point of fact, the German divisions on the Eastern front were contaminated by Bolshevism, and when they came back across Germany they brought the message of freedom and peace with them. Germany did have an abortive Communist revolution—partly because of Russian operations—though it was stopped by an alliance of the moderate Socialists and the dependable remnants of the army.
The Russians went on merrily through a living hell. For five more years the Bolshevik leaders held their country together with wretched industrial production, poor food, bad weapons. They had amazingly high morale among their own select Bolshevik group, and against the common people they had two weapons, propaganda and terror. (The terror was symptomatic of the first of the modern totalitarian dictatorships; its domestic police role is not a part of psychological warfare.)
The Bolshevik propaganda was probably the finest propaganda effort ever known in history down to that time—down, perhaps, all the way to our own time. The political limit was beyond reach; anything in the old world was fair game. Things the sober Soviet citizen of 1946 would regard with veneration were open to ridicule in 1919-1922: patriotism, religion, national sovereignty, international law, treaties with or between capitalist states. There flowed from Russia a world-wide stream of propaganda, mostly clandestine, some of it overt. In every nation of the world there was, to a greater or less degree, a "Red scare"; the propaganda of the Bolsheviks was regarded as having mystical subversive powers which no other operation could match. In retrospect it seems absurd that anyone could have worried about the Americans of the 1920's revolting against their own Constitution; but a lot of people, including the Attorney General of the United States, did indeed worry.
They had cause for alarm though not for the reasons they supposed. Much of the magic of Bolshevik propaganda arose from its taking up where British, French and American propaganda left off. The psychological warfare of the Allies had made the sad mistake of promising a new, a better world to everyone on earth. When the war ended, and conditions went back to normal, many people in the world did not consider "normalcy" the fulfillment of that better world. The Bolshevik propaganda reaped the harvest which the Allied propagandist had sown and then left untended. Expectations, whipped up beyond normal, turned to Bolshevism when the Western democracies abandoned both domestic and foreign propaganda operations. The strategic advantage of Bolshevik propaganda was overwhelming. The Allies had gotten the world ready for it, so that the wild Utopia of the Leninists temporarily made sense to millions.