Customer Reviews

The Secret World of American Communism (Annals of Communism Series)

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This book should result in the rewriting of some aspects of our history. The idea that American Communists were just trying to create Socialism in America with "guidance" from their fraternal brothers and sisters in Russia is a blatent lie: as the authors show, the CPUSA was a puppet for the Soviets, doing their bidding. Particularly disturbing was the aspect of Americans attending military courses while in Moscow and wearing Red Army uniforms. A dark chapter in American history unveiled.

This is another terrific volume in that valuable and terrific series - "The Annals of Communism". The 92 documents provided in this book demonstrate clearly the way that American communism was used by the Soviet Union as a base of intelligence gathering. This is not to say that every American communist was disloyal, but that the funding and organization was provided from Moscow for purposes far from merely ideological.

There is also a very good discussion of the Soviet involvement in the American and Canadian brigades that went to the Spanish Civil War (there is another great volume in this series specifically on this, by the way). And more background on Elizabeth Bently, the Perlo Group and the early funding of early American communists such as John Reed (who received more than a million dollars).

There is only a bit here on Venona, Hiss, Greenglass, and the Rosenbergs, however. Although what is here is mostly summary material. There are other volumes you can turn to for more comprehensive and concrete discussions of these topics. This book does state their guilt with the view that Ethel Rosenberg was used as a wedge against Julius and called the government's bluff.

It is a very fine volume that I am glad to have in my library. There are two appendices: the first on the archival record and the second on the organization of the American Communist Party. There is also a list of selected readings and an index.

As the authors make clear in the introduction, this book presents only a handful of thousands of documents regarding American communism which they found in ex-Soviet archives.

The authors note that most scholorship of the fifties, sixties and seventies painted a fairly accurate picture of American communism. According to this picture, well documented here, the Soviet Union used the American communist parties as tools for Soviet foriegn policy. To that end, the Soviet Union funded the parties, controlled their public policy, directed undergound and subversive activities, and used the parties to recruit and control spies.

Much of the prose is rather dry. The authors present primary document after primary document, with limited commentary interspersed between them.

While some people may not like the picture this book paints of what Lenin called "useful fools" (Westerners who naively advanced the Soviet's imperialistic ambitions) they can not deny the evidence.

Finally, the brevity of this account makes it a good primer on the secretive nature of an organization dedicated to an ideology bent on undermining individual freedom. However, it should not serve as the sole source of information on the subject.

Two scholars and interpreters deep in the Comintern archive. You get Morris Cohen's application to join the International Brigades. Primary source evidence of Soviet control of CPUSA and the cross pollinization into intelligence and information gathering. A must read for Comintern addicts.

After World War II, as the Seventy Years war heated up, various defectors from the Communist cause told the world that the Communist Party, USA was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union, which was dedicated to foisting it's system on the world through espionage and subversion. Cooler heads said they were paranoid nuts.

Well guess what? The "paranoids" were dead right. When the Soviet Union dissolved, various closed archives became available to Western researchers, including the secret records of the Communist International and the CPUSA. They showed that the all the worst things said about Communism for years were exactly true. Read the long denied truth in this excellent volume.

certainly no problem with the delivery of the product, but to send a popular novel without a jacket or book paper cover is a wrong that needs remedied?? also the back main cover had food crumbs (small)cohered to it.

Klehr, Haynes and Firsov are using this Anals of Communism series to continue Senator Joseph McCarthy's fight against McCarthyism. If you loved Joe, you will love these books. If you thought Joe was blowing a lot of steam about what should have been private political decisions, then you will not find much of interest here.

Here is the scoop: Klerh, Haynes & Firsov do a little bit of digging in some KGB and other Russian archives and they find some documents indicating that the Soviet Union had contact with American Communists. But when you look at what actually came of these contacts (almost nothing more than the funding of some groups that focused on racial equality--a cause that Klehr, Haynes & Firsov obviously object to) it becomes clear that these authors simply want to discredit the American left's work for equality.

The thick levels of jingoistic interpretations spread throughout this book make it difficult to read. There is no serious mention of the same sorts of the programs that the US were conducting in other contries, and given the CIA's history of assasinations, disruptions of elections, and military takeovers around the world, it is odd to see this book harp on and on about a little bit of money from a foreign source designed to support a domestic, democratic group of citizens interested in equal rights for all. A cause of no interest to McCarthy, Klehr, Haynes and Firsov.