Kimmage
The Burden of Being Good
Michael Kimmage
when ronald reagan described the Soviet Union as an evil empire in
his 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, the empire
part was not the sticking point. The United States had often worked with
European empires, after all, and Reagan himself had been knighted by
Queen Elizabeth II—an accolade, among other things, of the British
Empire. For Reagan and many other U.S. presidents, empire was more
a fact of life than a self-evident example of politics gone awry. It was
the Soviet Union’s evil that bothered Reagan. He loathed the Soviet
capacity to project that evil through its dominion over others.
And Reagan was right. A thread of evil ran through Soviet
history. The Bolsheviks admitted no law higher than their party’s
expedience as defined by Lenin and Stalin. They imprisoned and
executed and tortured at will. They subordinated whole peoples to
the state they were building. Siberia’s gulag and Moscow’s Luby-
anka prison were the proof, and they were the tip of the iceberg.
Stalin made terror a fulcrum of Soviet society, adding a string of
atrocities and secret-police actions in central Europe to his resume.