Jon Guze

Between 1918-1922, following the Marxist playbook of violent conflict between social classes, communist revolutionaries set out to eradicate the old ruling class. Known as the Red Terror, the Bolsehvik regime carried out a state-sponsored campaign of political repression and mass killings during the Russian Civil War. Instigated shortly after the rise of Vladimir Lenin and formally decreed following an assassination attempt in August 1918, the campaign aimed to eliminate political dissidents, independent academics, counter-revolutionaries, and other perceived class enemies. The primary instrument of this terror was the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police led by Felix Dzerzhinsky. The Cheka operated outside traditional legal frameworks, holding the power to arrest, trial, and execute individuals without due process. Victims were chosen not necessarily for active resistance, but for their social background, profession, or wealth. Members of the former nobility, clergy, intellectuals, merchants, and striking workers were frequently targeted. Methods of control included summary executions, arbitrary arrests, and the creation of early forced labor camps, which served as precursors to the later Gulag system. While official Bolshevik reports acknowledged a few thousand executions, modern historians estimate that the total death toll of the Red Terror ranges from 100,000 to over 500,000 victims. Beyond those directly executed, the campaign effectively silenced political opposition, destroyed independent press, and established terror as a fundamental mechanism of state control, laying the foundational authoritarian structures that Joseph Stalin would later expand. While Stalin deservedly has a status as one of history’s great monsters, Lenin sometimes gets a pass, his wrongdoings somehow diminished by the scale of his successor’s crimes. But the Red Terror serves as a reminder that systematic violence, repression, and the elimination of individual liberties are inherent to communist rule from its very inception.

While much of Europe drowns in debt, Switzerland offers a radical alternative: spend within your means, keep taxes low and let markets work. In the 2026 Heritage Index of Economic Freedom, Switzerland ranks second in the world. Property rights are strongly protected, regulation is light by European standards, and fiscal health remains sound. Public debt sits well below the levels common among its neighbours while the tax-to-GDP ratio is 27 per cent, closer to the United States than to France or Germany. A constitutional debt brake, approved by voters in 2001, requires the federal budget to balance over the cycle and has constrained the growth of spending even through crises. Openness has reinforced the discipline. Switzerland maintains high levels of trade relative to the size of its economy and has long treated foreign investment and competition as normal rather than as threats. Neutrality has kept it outside the military and fiscal commitments that have expanded state budgets elsewhere. The combination has produced a high-income economy whose government does not need to borrow continuously to fund its operations. The contrast is stark. Countries that raised taxes, expanded entitlements, and treated debt as a routine tool of policy now face the arithmetic those choices created. Switzerland’s approach has been less dramatic and less frequently celebrated but has proven much more durable. Low taxes and open markets just works.