So are you saying they payed all of them? I don't think so. Not even close. The money would have been better spent in other areas. Plus you have to take bureaucratic inefficiency and theft which was a very big problem under this type of system. Not to mention there simply would not have been enough funding to do it all. Many of these guys received their money through the support of universities and others who where rather wealthy and believed in that stuff with in their respective countries(now how they made their wealth is a different story and up to some discretionary thinking). The Soviets mainly saved their money for bribery, blackmail, extortion, propaganda ops, terrorism which was very big, the hippies of the 60's and the general like, green movements to an extent, supporting other countries operations to one extent or another, their own military, intelligence, and of course espionage. Even if we take the Narc trade they set up in the late 50's early 60's it still wouldn't be enough. The fact of the matter is that many of these Marxist movements would have to seek funding else where, and as it turns out here in the U.S. the best source of it was to have it voted to them via the public treasury. It didn't even have to go to them directly. All it had to do was support some form of socialism in order to weaken and open new doors(let it spread like its own independent(as possible) cancer). Of course if you’re the USSR or another Marxist governments this possibility to bilk your enemy out of their own money and use it to further your own gains would simply have been far to tempting to pass up. And as we know they didn’t pass it up, then again we didn’t seem to mind either which was just stupid thinking.
It was a business ~ !
A nasty, deadly business, but a business just the same.
Anyone who has ever worked in a large multi-thousand person company knows more about how Communism works than any student or analyst of the subject. The only big difference is that you have fewer killings at work ~ they still happen though. Sometimes the Corporate Jet crashes.