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Books : The Soviet World of American Communism (Annals of Communism Series)In association with Amazon.comRating:  - A model of historical documentation and interpretationInterpretation 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. |
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