The Soviet World of American Communism

February 15, 1998
Histories of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) all build on Theodore Draper's classic The American Communist Party: A Critical History, 1919-1957 (1957. o.p.). The recent opening of Soviet archives to scholars has generated a new spate of books. This one is a companion to the authors' earlier The Secret World of American Communism (Yale Univ., 1995), and follows the same format of interspersing reproduced documents with well-informed narrative. The authors focus on the CPUSA's relationship with the Communist International (Comintern), whose mission was to spread world communism from its inception in 1919. The Comintern, they conclude, closely directed the CPUSA, allowing little independence in the American party's daily functioning. The book concentrates on the period from about 1920 until Khrushchev's secret 1956 speech that condemned Stalinism and served to undermine communism's international cohesiveness. This valuable synthesis will complement Albert Fried's recent Communism in America: A History in Documents (Columbia Univ., 1997). Recommended.--Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames

February 1, 1998
This title continues the Annals of Communism series about documents found in Soviet-era archives. Important for students, the series might be too specialized for general-interest libraries, yet some installments coincide with serious-minded popular tastes, including "The Fall of the Romanovs "(1995) and this portrait of the Communist Party of the United States of America, which in the 1930s and 1940s was significant in domestic politics and about which Klehr has written previously ("The Heyday of American Communism," 1984). The documents Klehr's team unearthed illustrate the total dependence of U.S. Communist Party members on the Soviet Union. Soviet influence inevitably extended from financial support to policies and personnel, and the most poignant documents here concern Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a black leader of the party who worked for the Comintern in the 1930s--then disappeared. But in his case, one of as many as a thousand accused Trotskyists that the American party turned over to Soviet police, there was a paper trail, which is reprinted here. Rich source material for history students. ((Reviewed February 1, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)