In his appeal this morning for National Review‘s ongoing webathon, recent full-time addition Noah Rothman writes about the Soviet Union. Recounting how, in 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev at last spoke publicly about his predecessor Joseph Stalin’s crimes, Noah reminds us that Kruschev himself wondered, “Why is it that we see the truth of this affair only now, and why did we not do something earlier?”

Noah’s appeal is doubly timely, given that Stalin died 70 years ago yesterday (thank God). Noah is correct to analogize this instance of post-Stalin belated truth-telling in the U.S.S.R. to today, when “there are still plenty of powerful inducements that convince those in command of the facts to keep that knowledge to themselves.” But in that tyranny, all things were relative. This is the same Kruschev who threatened to “bury” the West, and who was in charge when William F. Buckley Jr., in NR’s mission statement, called communism “the century’s most blatant force of satanic utopianism,” coexistence with which was “neither desirable nor possible, nor honorable.”

It took a few decades of standing athwart received opinion and accommodationist sentiment, but eventually it was the U.S. that buried the Soviets – with considerable help from longtime NR reader Ronald Reagan. After the 1980 election, an NR ad appeared in the New York Times: a picture of a campaigning Reagan, reading a copy of this magazine, with the caption, “I got my job through National Review.” It was no idle boast.

But the successes of Reagan and NR were not guaranteed. The former depended considerably on the man’s character. And the latter depended, as it always has, on the support of readers, who have already given nearly $80,000 to our current webathon. The Soviets are gone now, but threats abroad remain, from the Soviet husk now commanded by a former KGB agent, and from the Chinese Communist Party, whose lies NR has been unafraid to dispel. And Reagan is gone as well, but the conservatism for which he stood is needed more than over, to defy an American Left that continues its war on this country’s Founding and now makes war upon reality itself by denying the differences between male and female.

The CCP abroad and the Left at home see the triumph of their causes as inevitable, much as the Soviets did during the Cold War. With your help, the former two will be proven wrong as the lattermost was. If you appreciate the work we do, and would like to see it continue, please consider lending us your support. Every dollar we receive now will be matched by a generous donor up to $100,000, making your gift go twice as far. We’re grateful for whatever you can give, and will continue to strive to be worthy of it.