Reflections on World Communism post February, 1956 (from Reno work summit, June 1, 2026)
AI-generated visualization of Khrushchev's 1956 speech.
On June 2nd, 2026, several top advisors to the International Freedom Alliance (IFA) gathered for a quiet work meeting over the course of several days.
Research, documents and presentations were pre-circulated prior to the work sessions.
These essays, notes, and presentations are posted without attribution for the edification of our readers, until presenters have had the opportunity to review and approve the content in final form.
The content is valuable, coming from individuals with decades of experience on the issues under discussion. Attribution will follow following more careful review from the authors.
But communism has not collapsed and the Chinese communists learned from the lessons of both Khruschev and Gorbachev reforms. Beijing broke with Moscow over Khruschev's denunciation of Stalin – they remain the ultimate Stalinists -- and further distanced their ideology from Soviet communism under Gorbachev and perestroika.
They call the turn away from Stalin "historical nihilism" and under Xi Jinping this has been blamed for the massive corruption among the Party and government and the disinterest in communism among youth. The so-called lying flat movement.
Historical nihilism is what the CCP blames on U.S. ideological subversion – would that it were so. The party defines it as “rejecting the [communist] revolution; claiming that the revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party resulted only in destruction; denying the historical inevitability in China’s choice of the socialist road; calling it the wrong path; and [arguing that] the history of the Party and New China is a continuous series of mistakes.” Read that as the 60 million dead under CCP rule.
First Khruschev denounced Stalin then Gorbachev denounced Lenin resulting in the collapse of the CCP's progenitor, the Soviet Communist Party, the state and its empire.
The danger for the CCP manifested itself in the events of June 1989 when the party faced it worst crisis since taking power in 1949 – fueled by the fall of the Berlin wall and collapse of Soviet satellites.
This was a triggering event for the rise of pro-democracy, pro-freedom forces in China and even within the CCP leadership. It ended with tanks and troops that slaughtered hundreds if not thousands of Chinese pro-democracy protesters.
Tiananmen forced the party into a major ideological retrenchment that led today to the leak in 2013 of Xi Jinping's signature policy for increased communist ideological control. It is called Document 9 and it is an ideological declaration of war against the U.S.-led global democratic system.
Document No. 9, formally titled "Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere", was a confidential internal directive issued by the General Office of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee on April 22, 2013.
It is the central hardline ideological manifesto warning against perceived threats to the Party’s monopoly on power.
Using alarmist terms, Document 9 portrays the ideological battle as generally positive but under severe challenge from Western-influenced ideas that seek to subvert the CCP through the internet, academia, media, and civil society.
The document identified what it calls seven dangerous “false ideological trends” (often called the “Seven Don’t Speaks”) that party cadres must vigorously resist.
They include Western Constitutional Democracy — regarded as an attempt to undermine CCP leadership and “socialism with Chinese characteristics” through separation of powers, general elections, and independent judiciaries.
Universal Values -- freedom, democracy, human rights — blamed for eroding the theoretical foundations of Party rule by suggesting western values transcend socialism.
Civil Society too is denounced as a Western tool to dismantle the Party’s social base by promoting independent organizations.
Neoliberalism — claimed to be seeking to alter China’s basic economic system by weakening state-owned enterprises and prioritizing markets.
Western Ideas of Journalism — opposed for challenging the principle of Party control over media and promoting “freedom of the press.”
Historical Nihilism, as I mentioned, is denounced for rejecting the CCP’s revolutionary history, questioning Mao Zedong Thought, and highlighting past traumas like the Cultural Revolution.
Questioning Reforms and Opening Up — Targeting challenges to the socialist nature of China’s system.
In response, Xi ordered nationwide strengthened ideological education, tighter control over media, universities, and the internet, and renewed vigilance against “hostile foreign forces.” He demanded that Party members reaffirm confidence in the socialist path, theory, system, and culture while stepping up efforts at combating subversion.
Document 9 signaled Xi Jinping’s turn toward totalitarian rule – yes, not simply authoritarianism. The totalitarian system now emphasizes ideological purity, historical control, and resistance to western and liberal influences. It has guided crackdowns on dissent, total media oversight, and shaped policies prioritizing Party supremacy over the subsequent decade.
A bit on neo-Marxism that is aligned with Chinese communism ideologically
By the 1930s a number Western intellectuals reluctantly realized classical Marxism had failed and the proletariat wasn’t revolting.
But then a group of exiled German Marxists led by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse decided to change the battlefield.
Instead of economics, they targeted the “cultural superstructure”: family, religion, tradition, sexual norms and the very idea of objective truth. Their weapon was Critical Theory - a relentless campaign of negative criticism designed to portray every Western institution as inherently oppressive and capitalism as not just economically flawed, but psychologically and morally corrupt.
Marcuse gave the strategy its most powerful tactical manual in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”: true liberation, he argued, required “liberating tolerance” - tolerance only for progressive ideas and outright intolerance for conservative or “regressive” ones. Free speech, in other words, was only legitimate when it served the Marxist revolution.
The intellectual poison of the Frankfurt School was extraordinarily influential and as its graduates and intellectual heirs colonized universities, media, NGOs and corporate HR departments.
Critical Theory evolved into today’s identity politics, DEI mandates and cancel culture - a neo Marxism that attacks the individual in the name of group grievance.
What began with a small circle of German émigrés in the 1930s now shapes the moral vocabulary of much of the Western elite. The result has been a softer, more pervasive authoritarianism: the dictatorship of the politically correct.
So in the final part of my ideological net assessment, what about the forces for good in the United States and western societies?
For this I'm turning to a remarkably prescient speech by the late Russian writer and Nobel Prize winner Aleksander Solzhenitsyn.
His 1983 speech in London was given as he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. Its formal title is "Men Have Forgotten God" and it has also been headlined as "Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag"
A short aside on the Gulag Archipelago…
The central thesis is that the root cause of Russia's catastrophic 20th century — the revolution, the Gulag prison labor camps with the tens of millions killed — was a single spiritual failure: People forgot God.
By 1983 the exiled Solzhenitsyn argued this is not merely a Russian problem but is a universal one defining the entire 20th century. And I'm sorry to say it is something that is accelerating in the 21st.
Solzhenitsyn declared correctly that atheism is the engine of communism.
A hatred of God is not incidental to Marxism-Leninism but is its very core. Militant atheism is the central pivot of communist policy, not a side effect.
To control the population, communism first had to destroy religious and national feeling. This began with the systematic persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church — martyred clergy, destroyed churches, children forcibly separated from religious parents.
This is continuing under Chinese communism despite a period when unofficial churches in China flourished – prior to Document 9 – and are now being suppressed ruthlessly.
What is happening today is the spiritual decay of the non-communist societies of the west. They are succumbing to godlessness by a different but equally fatal route — gradual secular erosion rather than violent suppression.
America and the West have replaced lofty ideals with the "pursuit of happiness" that increasingly has banished the concepts of good and evil from public life. Today we are seeing the emergence of successive younger generations that share a spirit of hatred for their own civilization.
Solzhenitsyn traced this malady to what he called a "mental eclipse" during World War I among Europe's leaders that led to a loss of awareness of a higher power.
"The failings of human consciousness," he said, "deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century."
Then after World War II the West's embrace of the idea of the "nuclear umbrella" served as a substitute for moral courage reflecting another form of godlessness.
He noted that it was the Russian writer Dostoevsky who warned that “great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared.” This is precisely what has happened. And Dostoevsky predicted that “the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the demon of evil.”
Solzhenitsyn said whether the world really will be saved we shall have to wait and see. And this will depend on our conscience, on our spiritual lucidity, on our individual and combined efforts in the face of catastrophic circumstances. But in 1983 this literary prophet said that was already coming to pass that "the demon of evil, like a whirlwind, triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth…"
It was during this period that the West, led by the US, adopted a passive acceptance of Soviet tyranny over Russia and Eastern Europe that is the direct result of spiritual deficiency facilitated by a drive for business and trade as the hoped for tool of ending communist tyranny.
This is exactly what is happening today as we see after Trump's visit to China and his declaration of a new strategic competition supposedly built on a Beijing agreement to end its unfair trade practices, it's massive theft of intellectual property and cyberattacks and to begin holding trade and economic relations with other nations as a normal non-threatening communist power.
Solzhenitsyn said a key religious failure was Russian orthodoxy that led to the rise of secularism and opened the path to Marxism-Leninism. By 1917, faith had virtually disappeared in educated circles and among the uneducated its health was threatened.
Earlier, it was Dostoevsky who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church that the lesson is “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.”
That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism-Leninism.
"Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot."
Yet communists and all variants of its have found ways to deceiving religious people and churches. Witness the support among communists and Marxists for radical Islam.
Today we see the fragmentation and divisions within Christianity and the slowness of ecumenical efforts at a moment when the world is "perishing 100 times more quickly."
This is clear in the United States with Christian churches seriously divided and unable to counter the harsh moral and spiritual decline and the systematic breakdown of the traditional family.
Solzhenitsyn, concluded that no political, nuclear, or economic solution can save the world without "a repentant return of our consciousness to the Creator."
The key to civilization's survival lies not in systems or ideologies but in each individual human heart. The Enlightenment's promises are exhausted. The only remaining path is reaching again for "the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently pushed away."
Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest of worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder.
Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which The Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. In the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit moves with no less force: this we must grasp in this dark and terrible hour.
Instead of the ill-advised hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can only reach with determination for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently pushed away. If we did this, our eyes could be opened to the errors of this unfortunate time period and our hands could be directed to set them right.
Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during such trials that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone."
We know ultimately that communism and its variants are an ideology of evil propagated by Satan for the purpose of taking over completely and removing God from the world.
To meet the challenge we must rise to the occasion and spread the word of God. This, to me, is the most important mission all of us have right now.
The IFA would like to extend a thank you to all the scholars, policymakers, and citizens who joined us for this vital discussion. Together, we can build a constructive vision of society grounded in truth, faith, and human dignity.
