Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West [Hardcover]

Stephen Koch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 27, 1993

As part of its plan to achieve a worldwide communist revolution, the USSR employed a German communist and publisher to recruit Western intellectuals - among them Gide, Hemingway, Malraux, Dos Passos, Brecht, Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Koch examines the role played by these writers in the covert and propaganda operations carried out by the USSR between the 1930s and the 1960s. He shows how many idealistic sympathizers, motivated by anti-fascist feelings, became embroiled in a web of terror and deceit and found themselves party to the most debased of Soviet actions, such as the collaboration between Hitler and Stalin in the elimination of their political enemies (a secret clause of the Nazi-Soviet pact).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Brimming with revelations, Koch's astonishing and riveting expose focuses on Willi Munzenberg (c. 1888-1940), a German Communist, founding Bolshevik, Stalin henchman and director of Soviet covert propaganda operations aimed at the West's intelligentsia. Operating out of Paris, where he lived until his murder or suicide, he ran a vast network of controlling newspapers, film companies, magazines and political groups. Munzenberg's propaganda machine, by this account, orchestrated the worldwide campaign on behalf of convicted Italian-American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, bolstered Soviet movie director Sergey Eisenstein's reputation in the West, infiltrated England's Bloomsbury coterie and forged links with the infamous Cambridge spy ring of Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and associates. Koch, who heads the writing division at Columbia University's School of the Arts, presents persuasive evidence that Munzenberg's apparatus funded painter Georg Grosz and movie director Erwin Piscator and manipulated a host of writers, artist, journalists, Hollywood performers and public figures, among them Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Andre Gide, Dorothy Parker, Andre Malraux, Felix Frankfurter and Bertolt Brecht. We're shown that many of those targeted did not even suspect they had been singled out by Stalin's operatives. Drawing on Russian archives, interviews and U.S. dossiers obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Koch builds a plausible case that Munzenberg's "anti-fascist campaign" served as a cover for a collaboration between the German and Soviet secret services--a collaboration that began years before the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact and helped each dictatorship wipe out its domestic enemies. This real-life spy thriller unveils a major chapter in Soviet espionage.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Koch probes the purposefully hidden war of ideas between East and West, fascism and democracy to expose the links between propaganda and espionage. His accessible account focuses on the nefarious career of Willi Munzenberg, a German communist and master of disinformation, from his beginnings in the 1920s Comintern to his still mysterious death during the early days of World War II. Koch draws upon secondary sources, recently opened Communist Party archives in the former Soviet Union, and personal interviews to examine Nazi-Soviet cooperation during the 1930s, the recruitment and management of "fellow travelers," and the impact of the "apparat" in America. Recommended.
- James R. Kuhlman, Univ. of Alabama Lib., Tuscaloosa
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 419 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1st edition (December 27, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0029187303
• ISBN-13: 978-0029187302
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,126,148 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything you know is wrong: The REAL 1930s, May 27, 1999

By 

Stephen M. St Onge "Stephen M. St. Onge" (Mpls, MN USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West (Hardcover)

According to conventional history, in the 1930s Stalin became alarmed about Hitler and organized an international anti-fascist movement to oppose him. HA! Now that some of the archives of the ex-Soviet Union have been opened (OH! How I love to type "ex-Soviet Union"!), it turns out the whole thing was a con from begining to end. The reality: Stalin was determined to make a deal with the Nazis from the word go. He organized the "Popular Front" as a cover for this, as a distraction for the Great Purge, and, probably, as a means of getting Hitler in a war with the West. The details Koch presents would be unbelievable if they weren't documented (for instance, Soviet Espionage assigned women to seduce and marry selected non-Soviet writers, as a means of manipulating them in the cause of propoganda!). I can't rave about this carefully researched, beautifully written book enough. FIND A COPY AND READ IT!

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Manipulators Exposed, December 30, 1997

By 

A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West (Hardcover)

Stephen Koch's largely unheralded 1994 volume Double Lives, subtitled Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West, concerns itself with a careful examination of the extensive and intricate secret propaganda campaign of the Lenin and Stalin-era Soviet Union to globalize Communism, and demonstrates how an ambitious German opportunist by the name of Willi Münzenberg successfully manipulated notable Western writers and artists into participation in this propaganda network. Koch's work answers a number of questions which have recently been brought up by conservative commentators, like Michael Medved, in discussing the role of Hollywood and the entertainment industry in so-called "Culture Wars".

Double Lives demonstrates how Willie Münzenberg, operating as a legitimate German publisher and politician, oversaw a massive media empire of newspapers, magazines, and film companies, covertly financed by the USSR, that guided Western fellow travelers and Communist sympathizers. The list of notables successfully targeted by Münzenberg and his cohorts reads like a veritable "who is who" of leftist European and American intelligentsia. Ernest Hemingway, Romaine Rolland, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Lincoln Steffens, and Bertolt Brecht were just some of the many intellectual and literary cogs in Münzenberg's propaganda and espionage machine. While some, like Andre Gide, quickly grew disillusioned and broke with the apparatus, most stayed the course preferring to gloss over the more gruesome aspects Stalin's regime in their unfailing reverence for the Communist ideal.

Koch skillfully illustrates how Stalin used the anti-Fascist movement as a cover while he and Hitler made arrangements through their respective secret services to dispose of domestic enemies. Likewise, Koch discusses at length how Münzenberg's protégé and right-hand man, a Czech Jew named Otto Katz, created, expanded, and eventually presided over an extensive espionage network that included Bloomsbury's John Strachey, the notorious Cambridge spy ring, and, in America, Whittaker Chambers and his friends Alger Hiss and Noel Field.

It would be no great exaggeration to say that the cultural history of the Western world from the 1930's on was profoundly influenced by Münzenberg's and Katz's minions and their intellectual progeny. Koch presents ample evidence that Münzenberg's agents wielded considerable influence with the Los Angeles and Hollywood cultural elites via such fronts as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Hollywood League for Democratic Action. While Willie Münzenberg and Otto Katz were both eventually exterminated by the very Stalinist regime that they so faithfully and effectively served, we need not lose sight of the fact that the pro-Communist seeds that they helped sow in America during the first half of the century have by all accounts begun to beat fruit in the latter half. By successfully Stalinizing the already leftish entertainment business, while at the same time using the Hollywood allure to glamorize leftist politics, Stalin's agents prepared the groundwork for a Hollywood-led assault on traditional American `bourgeois' values which began in earnest in the late 1960's and which has achieved critical mass over the last ten years.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Anti Fascists" Exposed, August 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West (Hardcover)

Stephen Koch interviews the wife of master propagandist Willi Muenzenberg, who reveals the facts behind her husband's publishing empire. From Hollywood leftism, to well known writers, to support for Communist spies. This man, who watched Lenin leave the train station and was himself murdered by Stalin's henchmen, started the "perpetual apology" of Communism so prevalent then... and now.