Faith in Britain

The instrument which they used to execute their plan was a highly organised and disciplined party. Only members of the party would be eligible for positions of authority; other parties were proscribed. Everyone was to be subservient to the new totalitarian regime.

Those who claimed rights of individual ownership or property - for instance, the landowning peasants - were ruthlessly liquidated. All who expressed criticism or dissent were imprisoned, tortured, used as slave labour, or eliminated often without even the pretence of a sham trial. The secret police initiated a reign of terror which was emulated in each of the Soviet Union's subjugated republics and compliant satellites.

Soviet tyranny scorned democracy, describing it as an instrument of western capitalism. Freedom of speech, freedom to publish, freedom of worship, were all suppressed. The State's distorting mirror of a controlled media fed the people lies and propaganda which painted a deliberately false picture of the rest of the world.

In all its main features the Russian system was the model for the National Socialism of Hitler and Mussolini: the use of a disciplined party controlled by a despot; the banning of all other parties; the use of terror as an instrument of government; the suppression of law; the denial of freedom of speech and publication; the exaltation of brutality and cruelty as proof of manliness; the scapegoating of minorities; the scornful extermination of all human pity and mercy; the skilful use of lying propaganda; the locking out of external ideas and influences; the insistence that young people are trained and marshalled into obedient footsoldiers of the State. These were the crude and harsh realities of the system which Soviet Russia boxed up for export.

After Lenin's death in 1924 Stalin replaced Communism's aim of universal revolution with the priority of Russian industrialisation. Stalin extended the Party apparatus and built a corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy. He remained in conflict with many of the earlier revolutionaries and purged them to secure his own position. In the following years millions were slaughtered.

One hundred years earlier William Wilberforce had written: 'It is a barbarous policy which confronts the troubles of a turbulent land by the extermination of its inhabitants. This is the calm, not of order, but of inaction; it is not tranquillity but the stillness of death.'1 By the time he had finished, Stalin, it is estimated, had exterminated even more of his own citizens than Hitler killed. An estimated 60 million were dead.

In Moscow in January 1990 I met a Catholic Ukrainian student who told me a period story which I imagine could be replicated by hundreds of thousands of other families. He described how his grandfather had refused to display in his home the statutory portrait of Stalin. Challenged by the local secret police he eventually