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The hidden world of American communism can now be examined with the help of documents from the recently opened archives of the former Soviet Union. Interweaving narrative and documents, the authors of this book present a convincing new picture of the Communist Part of the the United States of America (CPUSA), providing proof that it was involved in espionage and other subversive activitives. 16 illustrations.
This groundbreaking historical study reveals the shocking infiltration of Soviet spies in America—and the top-secret cryptography program that caught them. Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages—documents of unparalleled importance for our understanding of the history and politics of the Stalin era and the early Cold War ...
“This important new book . . . based on archival material . . . shows the huge extent of Soviet espionage activity in the United States during the 20th century” (The Telegraph). Based on KGB archives that have never been previously released, this stunning book provides the most complete account of Soviet espionage in America ever written. In 1993, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev was permitted unique access to Stalin-era records of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States. Years later, Vassiliev retrieved his extensive notebooks of transcribed documents from Moscow. With these notebooks, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have meticulously constructed a new and shock...
The Amerasia affair was the first of the great spy cases of the postwar era. Unlike the Hiss or Rosenberg case, it did not lead to an epic courtroom confrontation or the imprisonment or execution of any of the principals, and perhaps for this reason, it has been largely ignored by historians. Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh provide a full-scale history of the first public drama featuring charges that respectable American citizens had spied for the Communists. It is a story with few heroes, many villains, and more than a few knaves. In June 1945, six people associated with the magazine Amerasia were arrested by the FBI and accused of espionage on behalf of the Chinese Communists. But only Philip Jaffe, editor of Amerasia, and Emmanuel Larsen, a government employee, were convicted of any offense, and their convictions were merely for unauthorized possession of government documents. Klehr and Radosh are the first researchers to have obtained the FBI files on the Amerasia case, including transcripts of wiretaps on the telephones, homes, and hotel rooms of the suspects, and they use this material to re-create the actual words and actions of the defendants.
Arguments about whether distinctive features of American society, culture, political structure, economic system, or population account for the relative weakness of American radicalism have engaged historians, sociologists, and political scientists for decades. Influential concepts such as frontier theory have been linked with the absence of class conflict in America. Other analysts have attributed the failure of the American Left to fierce repression, giving red scares and the McCarthy era as illustrations. Some have linked the American Left's failure to American immigration, winner-take-all elections, and the cultural values of individualism. The Communist Party, one of America's largest an...
Communism was never a popular ideology in America, but the vehemence of American anticommunism varied from passive disdain in the 1920s to fervent hostility in the early years of the Cold War. Nothing so stimulated the white hot anticommunism of the late 1940s and 1950s more than a series of spy trials that revealed that American Communists had co-operated with Soviet espionage against the United States and had assisted in stealing the technical secrets of the atomic bomb as well as penetrating the US State Department, the Treasury Department, and the White House itself. This book, first published in 2006, reviews the major spy cases of the early Cold War (Hiss-Chambers, Rosenberg, Bentley, Gouzenko, Coplon, Amerasia and others) and the often-frustrating clashes between the exacting rules of the American criminal justice system and the requirements of effective counter-espionage.
In The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes trace the turbulent history of American communism as both political party and social movement. Drawing on a wealth of research, they follow the party's fortunes from its origin in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, through its heyday during the Depression years, to the gradual decline in the post-World War II era. The authors examine the effect of the party's ideas on groups more in the mainstream of American politics, as well as the influence of communist "popular front" culture on American culture in general. While duly acknowledging the idealism of many American communists, the authors also take a clear-eyed look at the disturbing aspects of the American communist movement: its subservience to Moscow, its penchant for conspiratorial machinations, its bitter internal disputes and purges, its always latent and sometimes virulent totalitarianism.