Trying to eschew the savagery and brutality that had characterized his early years as a secret-police officer, Leo proposed a force that was moderate and restrained. His proposals were dismissed as naive. The police force created by the new Communist regime followed a Stalinist model. It pursued vendettas and arrested indiscriminately. After years of caution and striving to achieve power the President became quickly drunk on terror. Decisions on whether citizens should live or die were presented to him daily, lists of names for him to tick or cross. Ironically, Leo was marginalized by the Party’s success. He was no longer needed. He wrote reports to the Kremlin updating them on the nature of the monster that he had helped create.

Unchecked by laws, the President desecrated mosques and arrested religious leaders. The anti-religious campaign was so misguided yet pursued so rigorously, Leo speculated that the concept of God must be irritating to any newly formed dictator, one fashioned with god-like powers. The President’s attempts to sculpt Afghanistan into a Communist model overnight were equally misjudged. With Decree Number 8, the President limited the amount of land held to six hectares. The rest was confiscated by the State. The response was uproar among the population. There was a deep cultural attachment between the population and its land. Families lived where they were born: their identity and location were tightly bound together. These sentiments far outweighed any grievances felt by the landless labourers working as tenant farmers. An insurgency took shape while the President tinkered with the things he could control, not his people’s thoughts or beliefs, but their flag, redesigned, removing the minbar, the pulpit in a mosque, as the emblem and replacing it with a five-point star. On the day the new flag was hoisted, the President ordered the colour red to be celebrated. Pigeons were smeared with red ink, residents of Kabul were ordered to apply red paint to the exterior of their apartments, students painted their chairs and desks red. Leo was sent a note asking him if he’d consider painting his bicycle red. He saved the letter, marking it as evidence and including it with the report he wrote that night to the Kremlin describing the catastrophic failure of their satellite regime and predicting the imminent collapse of the governmnt.