Political observers have failed to explain the relentless leftward drift of the modern Democrat Party. The rhetoric of the party’s candidates may as well be that of socialists or even communists of the 1920s and ‘30s. The name “Democrat” today only masks the hardcore leftist that lurks behind it. We now tear off that mask and name the villain responsible for the demise of the once great party of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy. His name is “Comrade Jack,” and this is his story…

From the onset of the Cold War in 1946, the Soviet Union struggled to match the military spending of the West. The traditional May Day parades of missile transports and tanks through Red Square made for great spectacle but hinted at an underlying inferiority complex. World War II had revealed the awesome industrial capacity of America to produce arms and materiel; matching it with the inefficient Soviet factory system was a formidable challenge.

By late summer of 1991, the Soviet Union was in its death throes. On August 19, hardliners in the Soviet military and KGB launched a desperate coup that toppled General Secretary Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev from power. Within 72 hours, the “August Putsch” had reached a critical tipping point. The plotters had not foreseen angry Muscovites taking to the streets to protest their power grab. When word of the coup leaked out that fateful weekend, crowds of demonstrators swarmed the streets of Moscow to defy the junt and show support oddly enough, not for Gorbachev, but for the first ever elected government of the Russian Republic, Boris Yeltsin.

The citizens who surrounded the ironically named “White House,” Russia’s parliament building, were determined to keep the Red Army’s tanks from reaching the building. They appealed to the young tank crewmen to ignore orders to shell the White House. Everyone instinctively knew that the real target of the coup was Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Thousands were prepared to give their lives to protect Yeltsin and the other elected officials within.

The demonstrators were spilling into Moscow’s streets and blocking traffic all over the city. Women stood atop the makeshift barricades and begged the soldiers, "Don't shoot your mothers! Don't shoot your grandmothers! Here and there, soldiers and demonstrators began to talk about the situation. They found common ground, a desire to see an end to the nightmare of communism.

The crowd had traffic snarled a full three kilometers back up toward the center of the city, all the way to “the Lubyanka.” This was the KGB’s infamous headquarters building and prison, the dark heart of the Evil Empire. The shadowy figure looked out a third floor window at the chaos below in Lubyanskaya Square.

Revmir Ishakovich Yacov would have all of them herded onto trains to the gulags in Siberia if it were within his power. Once, not that long ago, it had been. The times, however, had changed. “Apparatchik, call for car,” he said quietly, his soft tone belying the rage he felt within. “Is time to go now.” “Da,” said the stocky little man in the trench coat as he picked up the phone to alert the driver to pull General Yakov’s Zil into the front court on the Furkasovskiy Lane side of the building. “Is time,” he spoke into the receiver before placing it back into its cradle. Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev was being held under house arrest in a Black Sea dacha while the coup plotters in the Soviet military and intelligence communities scrambled to solidify their power grab. They were fed up to their ears with Gorbachev’s concessions since he took office in 1985. His reform programs allowing inquiries into the dark past of the Soviet regime and limited free market principles within the dying Socialist economy threatened their tightly controlled world. To the hardliners who held Gorbachev captive, the words “Glasnost” and “Perestroika” were bile on the tongue.

On August 21, with Gorbachev in their control and about to officially resign for “health reasons,” a bullet to the back of the head being decidedly unhealthy, the plotters focused their attention on the last person standing in the way of their plan to turn back the Soviet reforms. That was Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Republic and in their eyes, a genuine Enemy of the Soviet State. Yeltsin, the first ever democratically elected leader of the Russian Republic, had since taking office in June of 1990 demanded ever greater autonomy for Russia from the Communist empire of the Soviet Union. Desperate to keep the Yeltsin from declaring outright independence, Gorbachev had no choice but to grant concession after concession to the brash, hard drinking Russian President. The world did not know it yet, but the great Soviet Bear was bankrupt. [Gorbachev, miserable face, balloon “we’re broke.” From the onset of the Cold War 45 years earlier, the Soviet Union had struggled to match the military spending of the West. The traditional May Day parades of missile transports and tanks through Red Square were always more show than substance, designed to give the impression that the Soviet Union bristled with state of the art military muscle. As the 1970s drew to a close, the Soviet Union had on paper 42,000 tanks in 30 divisions deployed in Warsaw Pact nations outside Russia facing the West. Behind the Iron Curtain, however, there was considerable doubt about combat readiness of those forces. [Russian tank crew, balloon “parts are on back order.”] Could a centrally planned economy, rife with inefficiency, corruption and worker dissatisfaction provide the means to keep the Soviet Union’s vast conventional armament at full strength? Tanks, especially Soviet tanks, need a constant supply of new parts, functioning armament, fuel, and sober crews to man them. Case in point: The Red Army failed to put down ragtag Mujahideen Islamic insurgents in Afghanistan after 9 years of fighting. In contrast, U.S. forces needed only a matter of weeks to take Kabul, oust the Taliban, and subdue most of the country in the wake of 9-11. History shows that particularly in the late stages of the Cold War, the great Soviet Bear was really a “paper tiger,” hiding its weakness from the West and struggling to provide enough of guns and butter to keep the Evil Empire afloat. [Russian peansant woman, balloon “We need more butter, you borschheads!”] That most certainly did not mean, however, that the Soviet Union posed no danger to the West. To the contrary, the inherent weaknesses in the USSR’s conventional military infrastructure forced Soviet military planners to place more eggs in the deadly basket of nuclear deterrence known as MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). In 1980, the Soviet Union was pointing nearly 3500 nuclear missiles at New York, Washington, London, Bonn, Paris and untold numbers of other civilian and military targets throughout the West. Soviet tanks may have been slowly rusting into scrap, but the Bear’s nuclear armament was more than capable of raining down hellfire from the sky. Enter the “Cowboy,” Ronald Wilson Reagan. Elected President of the United States over the hapless incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan immediately began poking the Bear with a big stick. Despite howling from the western media and other liberals to negotiate with the Soviets, or worse, unilaterally disarm, Reagan called for dramatic increases in U.S. military spending. A few years earlier, the Soviets began deploying “first strike” SS-20 Saber nuclear missiles in Europe during the Carter presidency, correctly reading that the weak kneed liberal Carter would do nothing but whine. [Carter in Oval Office, balloon “Waahhh”] Once in the Oval Office, however, Reagan responded to the Soviet threat by deploying Pershing II missiles. Check. When the Soviets continued SS-20 deployment, Reagan upped the ante with Tomahawk Cruise nukes, capable of nipping treetops for 2,000 miles before striking Soviet targets with zero warning. Check again. [Reagan at desk, balloon “The missiles have been fired…take that, Ivan.” While this kind of tit-for-tat build-up was nothing new in the Cold War arms race, Soviet military planners no doubt groaned at having to match or surpass this latest threat from the West. They were in for another rude awakening. This new American president, the “cowboy,” was unlike any they had faced before. Ronald Reagan intended to push the Soviet military industrial complex until it collapsed of its own bloated weight.

What came next was one of history’s pivotal points, the impact of which can only be measured with the distance of time. On March 23, 1983, Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). SDI was to be a ground and space based missile defense system capable of destroying Soviet nukes harmlessly while they were still in the upper atmosphere. Quickly dubbed “Star Wars” by liberal Democrat opponents and the media (but we repeat ourselves), SDI was actually a breathtaking proposal that threatened the concept of mutually assured destruction in the event of nuclear war. SDI meant America could survive a nuclear Armageddon no matter who started it.

“Useful idiots” in the West pooh pooh-ed “Star Wars,” but in truth it caused a panic among soviet military planners who were already losing sleep over their inability to keep pace with the West. Reagan’s plan was to spend the Soviets into oblivion without firing a shot, and he used every bit of his two term presidency to do it.

Fortunately, Americans elected George H.W. Bush to succeed Ronald Reagan. Bush I was hardly a Reagan conservative, but he knew enough not to mess with the gains that his predecessor had achieved. Had Michael Dukakis been elected that year, well, we shudder to think. As the decade of the 1980s came to a close, Reagan’s vision had nearly come to pass. The Soviet Union was spending way too much of it’s limited resources to match Western military spending, and way too little on consumer products for its citizens who grew ever more discontent with life in the “Workers’ Paradise.” So it was that in June of 1991, Boris Nicholayevich Yeltsin was elected President of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic with a majority vote, a first in Russian history. Yeltsin was a populist and the people who elected him had high hopes that he would improve their dreary lives. Mikhail Gorbachev had no such hopes for Yeltsin. He knew what the election meant, but was powerless to stop the growing autonomy of the Russian Republic as Yeltsin demanded ever more power be transferred from the central Soviet government to Russia. If “Gorby” was less than enthusiastic about Yeltsin’s election, the hardliners in the Communist Party were apoplectic. As Yeltsin took office on July 10, 1991, the hardliners began plotting to take control of the Kremlin and somehow resuscitate the dying Soviet Bear. [Soviet generals, plotting, balloon, “Remember the good old days?”] First they would take Gorbachev. It was simple enough. He was vacationing in a KGB dacha on the Black Sea. Surround the place with troops loyal to the hardliners and cut the phone lines. Getting their hands on Yeltsin proved a bit more of a task. Literally thousands of Muscovites had gotten wind of the coup and that’s when they began showing up in the rain outside the White House. They grabbed hold of anything that wasn’t nailed down and began to pile barricades around the enclave housing Yeltsin and the other elected Russian officials. These barricades would never stop the tanks which were even now headed down Kalinin Prospekt toward the White House, but with fellow Russians standing atop them, they formed a powerful psychological obstacle to the crews driving those tanks. Would they fire on their own mothers and grandmothers, as ordered, to preserve the Soviet dictatorship? Office furniture, park benches, cars, construction debris, anything demonstrators could get their hands on formed barricades 10 to 15 feet high around the Russian Parliament building, known ironically as the “White House.” The infamous Lubyanka served as headquarters for the KGB. The sub floors of the vast building that before the October Revolution housed an insurance company, had been converted into the KGB’s prison. Russians, with their characteristic dark humor born of centuries of suffering at the hands of tyrants, joked that the Lubyanka, while only 10 stories high, was the tallest building in Moscow. From its basement you could see Siberia. Yakov had made a name for himself, even within the community of KGB officers known for their ruthlessness. Yakov had once blah blah bah. To Western intelligence officers assigned to tracking and studying Yakov’s activities, he was known as “Comrade Jack.” re was just one more under control, there was one more key Key officers in both the Red Army and the KGB had quietly disobeyed orders from the hardliners who had seized power—orders to storm the White House and arrest the enemy of the state Boris Yeltsin. Russia’s version of White House was a 20-story office building and assembly hall that housed the Russia’s Congress of the People’s Deputies, the legislative body of the new Russian Republic.