Evil Empire 99The Soviet Union moderated after Stalin’s death in 1953, but it was
an exceptionally coercive state at the best of times—a tyranny and
an empire hidden behind the veil of a benevolent and acutely theo-
retical Marxism–Leninism. Reagan saw evil in the unfreedom of a
command economy that left people poor, their potential unrealized,
and their creativity eviscerated.
Reagan may have worried most of all about the Soviet Union’s
refusal to allow religion. “Let us pray,” Reagan said in his 1983 “evil
empire” speech to the evangelicals—“for the salvation of all of those
who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy
of knowing God.” What the evangelicals heard, and what they were
supposed to hear, was a condemnation of state-imposed atheism in the
Soviet Union. While the British Empire housed the Church of England,
the Soviet empire housed the perverse relics of Lenin for pilgrims to
visit on Red Square. The evil of the Soviet Union, according to Reagan,
was its pharaonic contempt for the People of the Book whose sorrow
it was to live there.
Yet Reagan was also wrong. The implications of his political
metaphysics—the simplified Old Testament flourish that had come so
naturally to him—went on to have a corrupting effect on the United
States. Reagan made a medieval knight of Washington, placed this knight
at the head of a crusade, and waved the banner of righteousness before
going on to slay the dragon of evil. Such blissful self-mythologizing
incurred two separate costs for U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis what would
become the former Soviet Union. First, it obscured the myriad attach-
ments that Russians (and others) had to their Soviet pasts, rendering
aspects of post-Soviet Russian politics incomprehensible. And, second, it
made the presumption of goodness continuous with the project of a whole,
free, and peaceful Europe. So virtuous was U.S. policy, in Americans’
eyes, that there was no one entitled or likely to challenge it until Russia