Look, comrades, I grew up at a time in this country when the thing we kids were taught to fear more than anything else in our little Midwestern lives was COMMUNISM!
Communist Russia — the USSR — was the big, scary enemy, a country led by authoritarian leaders like Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, who were attempting to take over the world and destroy democracy and the American way of life. They were the commies, the pinkos, the red menace — a nuclear-armed adversary who was also our rival in space...