Aided by disturbed world conditions between 1939 and 1953, Stalin started the Soviet chariot of conquest. He directly annexed a number of areas, such as eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, part of Finland, eastern Czechoslovakia, part of Roumania. Then, using communism as an ideological adhesive, Stalin created a Soviet orbit: Yugoslavia, China, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, North Korea, Czechoslovakia, Roumania, East Germany, Albania, Tibet, Outer Mongolia, and North Indochina (where bloody fighting was in progress at the time of his death). No wonder William Z. Foster in February, 1956, could boast that seventeen countries were “actually building Socialism or are definitely orientating in that direction,” having a total population of 900,000,000! He adds: “They constitute the beginning of the new Socialist world.” Note the use of the word “beginning.” Native communist parties, aided by Moscow, were often the instruments of subjugation, Trojan horses of the twentieth century. At other times Russian military power paved the way. Peoples with long traditions of freedom were betrayed into slavery. Significantly, no entire country has ever gone communist and become a satellite by the free choice of election. This grandiose conquest was abetted by Stalin’s inheritance of the tools of Marxism-Leninism, a way of life that is imperialistic, overbearing, and dictatorial. Some individuals may accuse Stalin, alone of the communist “Big Four,” of being responsible for the terror of modern-day communism. Marx, Engels, and Lenin, however, are also fully accountable, and so are Stalin’s henchmen, who still rule in the Soviet Union. Stalin may have been the active agent of conquest in our generation, but his knives were sharpened on the diabolical teachings of his communist predecessors. Even in Stalin’s time cracks had begun to appear in the communist empire. In 1948 a terrific fissure, the break with Tito’s Yugoslavia, rocked Moscow. Currents of discontent, leading to national communism, spread through the European satellite nations. (National communism holds that nations can find their own way to communism and need not slavishly copy Moscow, yet also implies full confidence in the aims and doctrines of Marxism-Leninism, whose application will result in world communism.) “Treason trials” sprouted in many places: Vladimir Clementis and Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia; Laszlo Rajk in Hungary; Traicho Kostov in Bulgaria. These high Party officials, all old-time communists, along with others, were executed. In Poland, Wladyslaw Gomulka, a deputy premier, was expelled from the Party and imprisoned. Stalin’s tyranny became even more strongly entrenched.