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The Soviet World of American Communism. By Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. xxxviii, 378 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0300-07150-7.)
For scholars of American Communism, the fall of Soviet Communism turned into a bonanza. It opened hitherto inaccessible archives and allowed Westerners to examine the Comintern's holdings on the American Communist party (CP), probably the single most useful source on the party's inner workings. Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes were among the first scholars to mine these materials. The collection of documents under consideration here is the second of a projected multivolume history of the American CP based on these new materials; in the first, The Secret World of American Communism (1995), Klehr and Haynes exposed the party's clandestine activities. In this one, they are trying to reveal "that the CPUSA was never an independent political organization" but one that "had extraordinary and unprecedented ties to the ruling political party in a foreign...