Winston Churchill personified this counter revolutionary drive.  It was he who proposed to “strangle the Bolshevik infant in its cradle”.  The Peace Conferees, meeting in Versailles, heeded Lloyd George’s warning of March, 1919, and turned their attention to the urgent task of strangling socialism.  Revolutionary beginnings in central Europe were stamped out.  Funds were raised and arms were supplied to the anti-Bolshevik forces in European Russia and Siberia.  At the height of the counter-Bolshevik crusade there were sixteen armies in Soviet Russia with the common aim of destroying Bolshevism and restoring the country to its previous status as one of the pillars of western civilization.  This military phase of the counter-revolution lasted for four years.  It failed.  By 1922 the Soviet leaders were able to turn their energies to the task of rebuilding a devastated country while they planned and organized a socialist society.

Counter revolutionary forces failed to overthrow the Bolsheviks during the civil war of 1918-1921.  They failed again when the Nazi armies swarmed into the Soviet Union in June, 1941.  The years from 1941 to 1945 cost the Russians perhaps twenty million dead, six million dwelling units and immense damage to their economy and their social organization.  When the war ended, responsible observers in the West predicted that if the Soviet power survived, decades must elapse before the country was back on its feet.

War destruction had played havoc with much of Europe.  The Soviet Union was especially hard hit.  Under the Marshall Plan billions of dollars of United States aid were poured into Britain, France, Belgium and West Germany.  At the same time, the Soviet request for United States loans was refused categorically by President Truman.  Alone and unaided the Soviet People repaired the extensive damage inflicted by the 1914-18 war, the Russian Civil War and the 1941 military invasion from the West, and went on with the task of socialist construction which the war had interrupted.  Within five years—­by 1950—­the Bolsheviks were again on their feet, going strong, extending substantial aid to China and other professedly socialist countries and playing a crucial part in the struggle for disarmament and peace.

At war’s end in 1918 the Soviet Union was struggling to draw the first breath of socialist life.  Three decades later, after expelling the Nazis, the Soviet Union was a sturdy giant of a nation standing head and shoulders above its nearest European competitors.  During the interval, Soviet Russia was attacked, denounced, boycotted, encircled, invaded, ostracized as the leading figure in “an international communist conspiracy”.  When the policy of intervention and invasion failed, the counter-revolutionaries turned to cold war.

Whether or not there was a “communist conspiracy” to overthrow capitalism, there was certainly an organized capitalist conspiracy to overthrow socialism-communism.  Representatives of the chief capitalist empires made repeated attempts to subsidize anti-Bolshevik forces in the Soviet Union.  From 1918 to 1921 and from 1941 to 1945 they used every available means, including military invasion, to overthrow the Soviet Union and stamp out the beginnings of socialist construction in Central and East Europe.