Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West Hardcover – December 27, 1993

"Double Lives" is written almost like a detective story. Koch knows how to spin a yarn, even if on the surface it may seem implausible. Some of his interpretations are eye-opening, particularly when it comes to allegations of cooperation between Hitler and Stalin. The confrontation between the two that began with the trial over the Reichstag fire is here termed a "deception." (pg. 48) According to his theory, the Nazi-Soviet collaboration began not in 1939, but in 1933.

Koch sees the main contrast between Hitler and Stalin less in their policies than in their differing temperaments. "Hitler's tyranny was defined by impatience. He was fast, and speed was his strength. His disarmed his enemies through the theatrical lightning of his violence. Stalin on the other hand was slow – slowness itself. Hitler acted soon, Stalin at last. Stalin's was the soul of the bureaucrat, Hitler's, of an actor. Stalin's terror owed nothing to effect; its whole power lay in immovable, faceless implacability." (pg. 130)

Koch thus holds to the view that Leninism was not a perverse form of Marxism but merely its radical application. Far from building utopia, the "Marxist-Leninist system was based on police terror, denunciation, and absolute power, and had been so from the beginning. There was never a moment when these did not dominate the political culture, and it was a culture which naturally favored and advanced Stalin's kind of sensibility: an intensely intelligent conspiratorial mind, obsessed with a sadistic and paranoiac need for vengeance, dead to all human warmth, and convinced that the only meaningful human motives are greed and fear." (pg. 136)

Moving to American authors, Koch describes Soviet attempts to co-opt him, make him a fellow traveler. While this did not succeed, he was skillfully manipulated to discredit those whom Stalin's apparat wanted discredited. Like John Dos Passos. By the way, their relationship is a subject of special interest to Koch – he subsequently wrote a book that expanded on the treatment given here: "The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles" (2006).

Other writers have covered the same territory, but few with such flair. A single, lively page of Koch (pg. 8, for example) gives a better overall impression of Münzenberg than Sean McMeekin does in his book "The Red Millionaire."

In his chapter on Noel Field, Koch provides more insight than Tony Sharp does in his recent biography, "Stalin's American Spy." Both Koch and Sharp acknowledge that one purpose of Field's arrest in Budapest was to provide propaganda cover for Alger Hiss, on trial at the same time in America. More importantly, though, he argues that far from being a victim, Field was "an entirely cooperative fingerman and provocateur, playing the role of the 'American master-spy,' whose 'testimony' could be used to put to death uncounted numbers of similarly compromised agents and comrades from the anti-fascist movement." (pg. 328)

Even today, the difficult thing for outsiders to understand is that Stalin's victims were in no sense his enemies. They were completely loyal, and would have changed places with their accusers if that had been called for. The problem with them was that they knew too much. They could protest their fealty all they wanted, but they still could not erase their knowledge. That is what Stalin feared – that if they were allowed to live, they might talk some day. Let them swear their allegiance all they wanted; for him, allies were nothing more than "traitors waiting to happen." (pg. 329)

This is an extraordinary history of Soviet influence operations in Europe and the US before WWII. People mock conspiracy theories, but the fact is that there was an organized, multifaceted, and well funded Soviet program to influence public opinion in Europe. The details are fascinating, and Koch's writing is elegant and often savagely ironic. This is an engrossing and enlightening book.

Seeing the varieties and intricacies of Stalinist propaganda, the techniques and goals, and the horrible consequences was enlightening.

Too important to miss. Must have for anyone who wants to UNDERSTAND.

So good that Ii bought another edition as a gift

In Double Lives, Professor Koch meticulously details the manipulation by the Soviets' master propagandist Willi Munzenberg of thousands of European and American progressive intellectuals in the inner-war period of the 1920s and 1930s by his vast publishing network and interlocking front organizations under the covert direction of the Communist International (Comintern) and the Soviet secret services of the NKVD and the GRU.

He particularly concentrates upon the intellectual elite that fell under Munzenberg's sway in this cultural war against the West.

This includes such persons as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Andre' Malraux, Andre' Gide, Pablo Picasso, Dorothy Parker, George Grosz, Lincoln Steffens, John Dos Passos, Bertolt Brecht, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

This volume shatters myth after historical myth of this critical period.

Munzenberg, Koch states, "developed what may well be the leading moral illusion of the twentieth century: the notion that in the modern age the principal arena of the moral life, the true realm of good and evil, is political."

The notion that - the ethical is the political - and that the highest form of ethical expression was "anti-fascism," - with the Soviet Union as the publicly-identified, ideologically most dedicated opponent of fascism, thus holding the moral high ground.

This myth was actually built upon the basest of lies.

As Koch demonstrates, from the earliest days of the National Socialist regime in Germany, beginning with the Reichstag Fire less than a month after Hitler became Chancellor, a sinister covert relationship existed between Nazi secret intelligence and their Soviet counterpart.

This clandestine cooperation continued throughout the decade: Hitler's massacre of Ernst Rohm and his S. A. leadership in the Night of the Long Knives; Stalin's terror purge of CPSU party members, feckless intellectuals, military officers (most notably Field Marshal Tukhachevsky's betrayal by documents forged in a Gestapo laboratory), and the murder of tens of millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, reaching its culmination in the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact of August, 1939.

Publicly the Soviet Union and their international Popular Front network (of what were secretly designated "useful idiots" or "Innocents' Clubs") preached "anti-fascism."

Covertly Stalin sought accommodation, appeasement, and eventual alliance with Hitler.

Besides fascinating details dealing with the duplicitous Reichstag Fire trials, the Cambridge Five British espionage scandal, the Spanish Civil War as an international component to Stalin's Great Terror, and finally Muzenberg's own mysterious murder, one of the most intriguing aspects of Koch's study involves the use of women espionage agents.

"Many of the `Muzenberg-men' were women. The Russian writer and historian Nina Berberova writes with astringent authority about a cohort of agents or near-agents, the women whom she calls the `Ladies of the Kremlin."

These were women who became influential figures in European and American intellectual life partly on their own, but above all through the men in their lives. The men, most often, were famous writers, `spokesmen for the West,' Meanwhile, the consorts whom they most trusted were guided by the Soviet services.

"Leading this list were two members of the minor Russian aristocracy: the Baroness Moura Budberg, who was mistress to both Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells, and the Princess Maria Pavlova Koudachova. Moura Budberg's links to the Soviets were shadowy, and remained secret for decades, until they were at last exposed by the Russian historian Arkady Vaksberg in his 1997 book, The Gorky Secret. We have more certain knowledge about the Princess Koudachova, who first became secretary, later mistress, wife, and at last widow to the once enormously celebrated pacifist novelist Romain Rolland.

"Maria Pavlova Koudachova was an agent directly under Soviet secret service control. There is some questionable evidence to suggest that she was trained and assigned to Rolland's life even before she left Russia after the Revolution. . . That she was a secret service operative, however, and one expressly planted in Rolland's life, cannot be doubted. Babette Gross (common-law wife of Willi Munzenberg) put it to me plainly in the summer of 1989. `She was an apparatchik,' she said flatly. `And she ran him.'" (Koch, page 28).

Koch proceeds to discuss other women deep within the Communist apparat, such as the American Ella Winter, and their distinguished men of distinction.

In Winter's case, the men were pioneer muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, and upon his death, Hollywood screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, part of Hemingway's circle immortalized in The Sun Also Rises.

Stewart was the Academy Award-winning author of The Philadelphia Story, and one of the highest-paid screenwriters of the day, notes Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley in Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, Crown Forum, 1998. He was also one of "the most vociferous guardians of the Party line," especially through the vexatious days of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (Billingsley, page 82).

Upon reading these various accounts a pattern soon develops.

The profiles were remarkably similar.

The men were all internationally known novelists, artists, playwrights, etc. celebrated for their independence of mind, their supposed integrity of spirit, but in actuality men who were manipulated by their muses.

The technique proved very successful in this inner war period.

There is no reason to believe that the Communist intelligence services ceased to use such agents of influence during the years of the Cold War.

"Yoko Ono, phone your office."