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Former British prime minister Winston Churchill’s 1946 description of the Soviet “Iron Curtain” descending upon Europe is often cited as the start of the Cold War, but it actually began in Canada a year earlier.

In September 1945, a Soviet cipher clerk working at the Russian embassy in Ottawa defected and told the RCMP that Russia was at war with its former allies. For days, Igor Gouzenko told his story to the media, government officials and police, but they refused to believe him. When he finally convinced someone at the RCMP, he was able to share his story with American and British intelligence agencies. What he revealed to them started the Cold War. With the world on the brink of a new Cold War with another repressive communist regime, this time in China, it is worth revisiting.

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Communism only survives by erasing all political freedoms. Citizens cannot have diversity of opinion or religion, and certainly cannot have freedom of speech. China’s ability to endure the Second Cold War is entirely dependent on its ability to maintain its control over what the Soviets called their “near abroad.” In the near abroad, a hegemonic power needs uncontested political authority and the ability to crush dissent, in order to safeguard the “political consensus” that the Communist party demands at home. In the first 20 years of the Cold War, Russia had to put down insurrections in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, and cut off West Berlin from the rest of the world. Checkpoint Charlie became a symbol of the Cold War with the completion of the Berlin Wall in 1961.