According to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, “Lenin and the Bolsheviks sought total power and claimed communist ideology made their rule as infallible and inevitable as history itself.” Protecting this myth of infallibility requires “a system of organized lying,” which we saw in the Soviet response to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. First they didn’t acknowledge it to the world, then they said it wasn’t that bad, then they said it resulted in only about 31 deaths.
This myth protection racket was articulated early in the Cold War by diplomat George Kennan, who served as the American charge d’affaires in Moscow. In his then-anonymous 1947 essay on containment policy toward the Soviet Union, entitled The Source of Soviet Conduct, Kennan described “the infallibility of the Kremlin,” and how the myth of infallibility, “requires that the party leadership remain, in theory, the sole repository of truth.” Anything contradicting the Soviet version of truth represents “precisely that which the Kremlin cannot and will not permit.”