As with THE SECRET WORLD OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM, this book answers long standing questions about the history of the Communist Party, U.S.A.

SECRET WORLD showed that espionage and subversion was an integral part of the Communist movement, a core activity. SOVIET WORLD shows just how tightly the CPUSA was governed from Moscow -- the only time there was a shred of independant thinking was during WWII, when the Comintern was out of touch.

There aren't a lot of big surprises here (though it was amazing to learn that Earl Browder once tried to think for himself). What there is is an end to arguments -- yes, the infamous "Duclos article" was written in Moscow, and intended to prepare the Party for the coming Cold War; No, Stalin was not interested in friendship with the U.S.A; Yes, the Soviet Union supported the CPUSA with extensive cash subsidies; yes, the Party was a wholely owned subsidiary of Moscow.

I look forward to more volumes in the Annals of Communism series.

This book brings some closure to the McCarthy era witch-hunt, and to accusations that many in the west, sympathetic to Communism, turned their backs on the Great Terror where millions of people died. When Communism fell ten years ago, archives were finally opened and the connection between Soviet controls of American Communism was finally documented. Not only did American Communists turn their backs on the politicide taking place in the Soviet union under the pseudoscience of cultural determinism, but in some cases they were implicated in handing over to the Soviets, American citizens of the Communist Party, who would be put to death.

But the real story is yet to be told. As I read this book it opened up more questions than it explained. Who were these traitors? Why were they so accepting of terror and totalitarianism and why did they cling so tenaciously to such a horrific doctrine, one that as it turns out was far more devastating in human life and misery than the Nazi Holocaust? And why were they so unwilling to question official doctrines, especially when they changed so capriciously from time to time?

But the big question, never mentioned in this book but glaringly apparent to any one who has looked into the Communist phenomena, is why were so many Jews at the vanguard of American Communism (and Communism in most Western countries)? This book never makes mention of their role. Was it because they felt persecuted under imperialist forms of government and Communism looked like a way to end the hatred of Jews? Were they more inclined than other ethnic groups to follow leadership blindly, as they once followed their rabbis when they were assigned to the Jewish ghettoes? Is it because Jews are more political and radical, whether on the left or the right? It would have added a lot if at least this book would have touched on these issues, as they are important for understanding why some people and not others are so easily led by different types of political systems and doctrines that strain the credulity of rationality.

But perhaps we are asking the wrong people to analyze why American Communism was such a pawn under Soviet control. More and more, those who understand human behavior via group evolutionary strategies can only answer these questions. That is, history and cultural analyses both fail to consider humans as artifacts that evolved thousands of years ago under different ecological conditions. Only recently have we been able to look at fascism, communism, democracy, and religious movements as attempts to meet our evolutionary goals.

Interpretation of US domestic politics during the Cold War has been bedevilled by ad hominem accusation and counter-accusation. The undoubted injustices perpetrated by McCarthyism have also long obscured the subject. The work of these authors - and also, in other books, of Ronald Radosh - must be counted not only impressive, but definitive. We now know, thanks to their efforts, that the Communist Party of the United States really was a tool of Soviet clandestine operations, and that those "revisionist" interpreters who portrayed it as merely a persecuted and progressive group of idealists were egregiously mistaken. In short, what was wrong with McCarthyism was its wild and irresponsible exaggeration, not its premise; there really was an organised attempt on the part of the CPUSA and its front organisations to infiltrate Soviet influence into the liberal democratic American polity. The authors demonstrate this with meticulous scholarship; their book is one of the most important works of contemporary history to have been published since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I read this book with interest, and then read a review that made me realize that Haynes and Klehr may have played a little fast and loose with some facts themselves. For example (taken from the review by Walter and Meriem Schnier), "when parts of Bentley's story are shown to be consistent with Venona, they are prepared to declare without any qualification that 'Elizabeth Bentley had told the truth.' They overlook the fact that the decoders of Venona used names and incidents from the FBI files to help make identifications and fill gaps - the very names and incidents that were often supplied in the first place by Chambers and Bentley." Their review, which can be found online ...doscuments numerous instances of sloppy interpretations and selective omission of facts. I suggest that prospective readers of this book read the full review for other examples of problems with the book's handling of material from Venona.

This book, jammed with information that's only come to light in recent years, tells a number of fascinating stories.

For starters, there's the story of an intellectual adventure. Venona was a small group of government employees who, with fearsome gobs of skull-sweat and toil, decrypted thousands of secret communications sent between Soviet embassies and Moscow during and immediately after World War II. The messages used an encryption scheme so complex that it would be a challenge to crack even with today's technologies. But teams of Americans and Brits--mostly female, as it happens, although there were plenty of brilliant men--were able to decode them with little more than pencil, paper, and brainpower.

Venona is also a story of terrible treachery. Independently corroborated by data from the Soviet and Comintern archives, the Venona decryptions confirm things that were once controversial. For example: the American Communist Party was a puppet of Moscow that eagerly engaged in criminal activities. Julius Rosenberg and Algier Hiss were guilty. Literally hundreds of Communist agents deeply infiltrated American government at the highest levels. And the Soviets also had a substantial subversive presence within the American labor movement and in many elite segments of American society.

Venona is also a story of Western bumbling. For years, naive American officials ignored or dismissed suggestions that there was any Communist threat. Several times this resulted in tragic losses now painfully visible in retrospect.

Perhaps most damning of all, Venona is a story of how obsession with secrecy can be costly. The Soviets became aware of Venona shortly after the war ended. They completely overhauled their systems, and the Venona project decrypted no valuable communications after the mid-to-late 1940s. This more than anything is what makes Venona fodder for discussion and debate.

From a conservative perspective we can understand why Venona was kept secret: Even after Venona's cover was blown, the Soviets could not know everything the US had managed to decrypt. For years after the Soviets found out about Venona, US counterintelligence was still able to make valuable use of Venona information.

But even when we knew the Soviets had discovered Venona, we refused to reveal so much as a single scrap of their decryptions to the public--even when such revelations would have helped convict traitors or eased public fears. Throughout several Democratic and Republican administrations, everything about Venona and what it had uncovered remained surrounded by a dense cloud of secrecy.

While the Venona secrets would seem to corroborate the worst and most paranoid fears of 1950s McCarthyism, the truth is arguably the reverse: because of information Venona uncovered, the US and most other Western governments did a thorough housecleaning in the years immediately after World War II. During those same years most of the leaders of the American labor movement also performed some housecleaning, and Communism lost its chic appeal in much of elite society. This was all BEFORE Joe McCarthy went off the deep end. Had at least some of the Venona messages been revealed to the public after we knew the Soviets had caught on, congressional anti-Communist investigations, had they happened at all, might well have been conducted in a more honest and responsible manner. In any case, years of pointless debate between conservative and left-wing intellectuals would have been avoided. And countless stereotypical Hollywood portrayals of anti-communists as paranoid and irrational probably wouldn't have happened.

Because ultimately, Venona confirms that people were right to suspect and fear the Communists. But it also demonstrates that by the 1950s, Soviet infiltration had become a manageable problem rather than a screaming crisis.

That excessive care with secrets can be just as destructive as carelessness with secrets has been argued rather passionately by former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was in large part responsible for the release of the Venona information, and who wrote this book's introduction. After reading it, it's hard not to see his point.

Harvey Klehr (Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University) and John Earl Haynes (20th Century Historian for the Library of Congress) do a fine job of not only relaying the Venona information, but of showing how it is independently corroborated by information now available in the archives of the former Soviet Union and the Comintern. But if their workmanlike prose is easy enough to read, the sheer number of players, events, and their interactions that are covered are sufficiently dizzying that a "Dramatis Personae" section at the start of every chapter might have been helpful!

It's not light reading. On the whole, however, this book is a must-have reference to anyone interested in the history of the 20th Century.

I see that many others have added comments on this book.. I purchased a copy of this one several months ago..

I must mention that I collect non-fiction, hard-cover books on the Intelligence Community, Covert Ops, SIGINT, ELINT, and related subjects...

Over the past 30 years, I've built up a collection of approximately 350 volumes and this particular book ranks right up there with the likes of "The Puzzle Palace", "Handbook for Spies" (Alexander Foote), and David Kahn's "The Codebreakers" ..

This one is real insight into what happens when crypto keys are carelessly handled... In this case many messages, generated by the Russians, with one-time pads that had been used more than once, in order to save time in the heat of WWII..

Encrypting multiple messages with the same one-time-pad allows a cryptographer to "break" the traffic and peer into its contents, which this book documents quite well...

SGD

Patricia Gibbons : " wa6ube at tactical-link.com "

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.

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.

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.