The Bolshevik propaganda was probably the finest propaganda effort ever known in history down to that time--down, perhaps, all the way to our own time. The political limit was beyond reach; anything in the old world was fair game. Things the sober Soviet citizen of 1946 would regard with veneration were open to ridicule in 1919-1922: patriotism, religion, national sovereignty, international law, treaties with or between capitalist states. There flowed from Russia a world-wide stream of propaganda, mostly clandestine, some of it overt. In every nation of the world there was, to a greater or less degree, a "Red scare"; the propaganda of the Bolsheviks was regarded as having mystical subversive powers which no other operation could match. In retrospect it seems absurd that anyone could have worried about the Americans of the 1920's revolting against their own Constitution; but a lot of people, including the Attorney General of the United States, did indeed worry. They had cause for alarm though not for the reasons they supposed. Much of the magic of Bolshevik propaganda arose from its taking up where British, French and American propaganda left off. The psychological warfare of the Allies had made the sad mistake of promising a new, a better world to everyone on earth. When the war ended, and conditions went back to normal, many people in the world did not consider "normalcy" the fulfillment of that better world. The Bolshevik propaganda reaped the harvest which the Allied propagandist had sown and then left untended. Expectations, whipped up beyond normal, turned to Bolshevism when the Western democracies abandoned both domestic and foreign propaganda operations. The strategic advantage of Bolshevik propaganda was overwhelming. The Allies had gotten the world ready for it, so that the wild Utopia of the Leninists temporarily made sense to millions. This does not mean that the Bolshevik propaganda of the 1920s was not good. It was good, technically, psychologically, politically--but good in terms of achieving an immediate scare at the cost of long-range confidence. The eventual cost to the Soviet Union was terrible. The Soviet government isolated itself and declared a condition of open psychological warfare against every other government on earth, including the United States. (This so exasperated Presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover that they refused to recognize the Soviet Union.) The Bolshevik propaganda was carried by: Russian government channels; Communist "party" channels (the Communists not really being a political party, anywhere, but using the name "party" to designate the hierarchy of a dogmatic, ruthless and fanatical political religion); trade unions; individual subversive operators; "cover organizations"; trade, consular and other official missions; leaflets in the mails; posters, books and other literature; films; radio.