Alva Review-Courier -

As we noted last week, the Cold War was a tense war of words between the United States and the Soviet Union that lasted roughly from the end of World War II until the early 1990s.

During the first two decades of that era, the primary leaders of the Soviet Union were Joseph Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. Both were brutal dictators who challenged at every turn two of the concepts that Americans hold most dear – democracy and capitalism.

Both men (as well as other Soviet leaders) tried to convince people the world over that Soviet-style communism was a better governmental and economic system than...