RONALD Reagan is one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century, because he did more than anyone else to bring about the demise of the most destructive ideology of that century: Communism.

And the dominating power in Communism was the Soviet Union. Reagan was right to call the USSR "The evil empire". The facts speak for themselves.

The Nazis murdered six million Jews in the holocaust. That hideous crime was - it seems shocking to say so - nothing compared with the deeds of Joseph Stalin, who slaughtered 40 million of his own people, invaded, occupied and subdued most of Eastern Europe, abolished democracy and free speech, imprisoned, tortured or put to death anyone who opposed his policies.

Far from bringing the blessings of prosperity to its populations, Communism produced a huge reduction in the standard of living in all the countries where it was practised. All this went along with a massive denial that anything was less than perfect in Communist regimes; and merely to suggest that the Soviet system was not heaven on earth was enough to get you dispatched to the gulag and the salt mines. As Robert Conquest pointed out: "Moreover, this massive misdirection spilled over into too many minds outside the Soviet Union itself, in the West".

There were noted fellow-travellers with Stalin. George Bernard Shaw wrote that Russia, which he visited in the 1930s at the height of Stalin's purges, was "...the nearest thing to the perfect society and far superior to what we have over here. In fact the population is overfed". Sidney and Beatrice Webb wrote millions of words in defence of Stalin's totalitarian hell on earth. HG Wells said of Stalin: "I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest".

Stalin deliberately used famine as a means to subdue his people and in doing this he was only following Lenin's edict: "Real nationwide terror reinvigorates the country and it was through terror that the French Revolution achieved glory". And the Western Left's adoration of all things Soviet did not come to an end with the death of Stalin. In the 1970s the Labour Party's National Executive was holding "fraternal party to party" talks at the very time that the Soviet thug Boris Ponomarev was arresting the leaders of the Baltic Social Democrats.

It is at this point that we should pause to meditate on the fact that no one was ever shot for trying to get into the Communist sector via the Berlin Wall. At a dinner given in honour of Fidel Castro on June 27, 1972, the Soviet leader Brezhnev said: "Our party has always warned that in the ideological field there can be no peaceful co-existence, just as there can be no class peace between the proletariat and the bourgoisie". Krushchev had already promised the West: "We will bury you".

The truly appalling fact is that none of the fellow-travelling Lefties in the West - referred to by Stalin as his "useful idiots" - has ever apologised and admitted they were wrong to support the USSR. This is because they hate Western civilisation and despise our traditions and institutions. I'm afraid that their influence, even after the end of old style Communism, still pervades. We see this in the dumbing down of our culture, in their dismissal of standards in public life as "elitism"; in their brainless insistence that democracy means any opinion, however ill-informed and stupid, is as good as any other. Ronald, thou shouldst be living at this hour.