International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement

Book Description

In a work of encyclopedic scope, International Trotskyism, 1929–1985 is sure to become the definitive reference work on a movement that has had a significant impact on the political culture of countries in every part of the world for more than half a century.
Renowned scholar Robert J. Alexander has amassed, from disparate sources, an unprecedented amount of primary and secondary material to provide a documentary history of the origins, development, and nature of the Trotskyist movement around the world. Drawing on interviews and correspondence with Trotskyists, newspaper reports and pamphlets, historical writings including the annotated writings of Trotsky in both English and French, historical memoirs of Trotskyist leaders, and documents of the Fourth International, Alexander recounts the history of the movement since Trotsky’s exile from the Soviet Union in 1929.
Organized alphabetically in a double-column, country-by-country format this book charts the formation and growth of Trotskyism in more than sixty-five countries, providing biographic information about its most influential leaders, detailed accounts of Trotsky’s personal involvement in the development of the movement in each country, and thorough reports of its various factions and splits. Multiple chapters are reserved for countries where the movement was more active or fully developed and various chapters are organized around crucial thematic issues, such as the Fourth International. The chapters are followed by extensive name, organization, publication, and subject indexes, which provide optimal access to the wealth of information contained in the main body of the work.

Customer Reviews:

Obscure topic, but worthwhile if you need it.......2004-04-26

Any history or politics student coming clean to the multitude of groupings that make up Leon Trotsky's latter-day followers will welcome this book, as it gives a broadly correct overview of all the various squabbling outfits and how they all relate to each other. On a micro level the book falls down from time to time: too many names are mis-spelt ("Colin" instead of Corin Redgrave, "Paul" instead of Hall Greenland, to name just two examples out of dozens), and some of the explanations for the positions of the groups are too hastily wrapped up by a quick review of a sect's newspaper headlines. On the other hand, many of these outfits have soldiered on with a mere handful of members, and while a comprehensive account has to acknowledge their existence, their relevance is often so minor that a cursory glance is probably more than enough. So, on balance, this is a solid overview - especially in those areas where Alexander is more comfortable - such as the US and Latin America.

Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

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Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and Their Western Contemporaries (Post-Contemporary Interventions)
Kang Liu , and Kang Liu
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0822324482

Book Description

Although Chinese Marxismâprimarily represented by Maoismâis generally seen by Western intellectuals as monolithic, Liu Kang argues that its practices and projects are as diverse as those in Western Marxism, particularly in the area of aesthetics. In this comparative study of European and Chinese Marxist traditions, Liu reveals the extent to which Chinese Marxists incorporate ideas about aesthetics and culture in their theories and practices. In doing so, he constructs a wholly new understanding of Chinese Marxism.
Far from being secondary considerations in Chinese Marxism, aesthetics and culture are in fact principal concerns. In this respect, such Marxists are similar to their Western counterparts, although Europeans have had little understanding of the Chinese experience. Liu traces the genealogy of aesthetic discourse in both modern China and the West since the era of classical German thought, showing where conceptual modifications and divergences have occurred in the two traditions. He examines the work of Mao Zedong, Lu Xun, Li Zehou, Qu Qiubai, and others in China, and from the West he discusses Kant, Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Marxist theorists including Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse. While stressing the diversity of Marxist positions within China as well as in the West, Liu explains how ideas of culture and aesthetics have offered a constructive vision for a postrevolutionary society and have affected a wide field of issues involving the problems of modernity.
Forcefully argued and theoretically sophisticated, this book will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary Marxism, cultural studies, aesthetics, and modern Chinese culture, politics, and ideology.

The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War

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Do these people matter?
Caveat
Got my eyes on you baby cause you dance so good
An aerial view of the culture war
Uncle Joe's Cafe

The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War
Hilton Kramer
Manufacturer: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 1566632226

Book Description

In these provocative and engaging writings, Mr. Kramer explores, in effect, the intellectual history of the cold war and its divisive impact on our politics and culture. Tracing the critical debate over communism and modernism, he surveys the writers who were in the forefront of that debate and the issues that animated their criticism and controversies. An honest, unsparing, and often devastating analysis. --Kirkus Reviews

Customer Reviews:

Do these people matter?.......2004-01-12

In his introduction, Hilton Kramer declares himself to be a "partisan" of artistic "modernism" and a "liberal anti-Communist." These essays are, then, a critique of twentieth-century Western leftist/modernist intellectuals by one of their own.

Much of the book is taken up with denunciations of the Stalinism which was rampant among Western intellectuals in the 1930s and '40s. Kramer is here generally on target: there is no longer any honest doubt that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy or that Lillian Hellman was a pathologically dishonest Stalinist stooge.

Even towards those intellectuals who were not tools of Stalinism, Kramer is unsparing. Although he seems in some ways to admire Mary McCarthy, he declares, "Mary McCarthy's politics were like her sex life -- promiscuous and unprincipled, more a question of opportunity than of commitment or belief."

The greater interest of the book lies in the hints Kramer offers the reader as to what went wrong with the whole twentieth-century intellectual enterprise. The author is never able to draw these hints together into a coherent explanation, perhaps because he himself continues to share the basic premises underlying the twentieth-century intellectual catastrophe.

Ernest Gellner once suggested that the rise of Anglo-American "linguistic philosophy" in the twentieth century was a consequence of verbalist intellectuals, having been displaced by modern science, trying to create for themselves a new niche which would justify their own skills of verbal manipulation.

The same analysis explains the intellectuals' attraction to both Marxism and "modernism."

In discussing modern art, Kramer refers approvingly to the "culture of modernism, with its 'difficult' texts requiring lengthy and laborious study..." He specifically lavishes praise on Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential of modernist art critics.

Why it is that "'difficult' texts requiring lengthy and laborious study..." are per se a good thing, Kramer does not say. The answer of course is that such texts provide a raison d'etre for verbalist intellectuals who possess no actual knowledge or any useful expertise. Tom Wolfe, in "The Painted Word," developed this point in a brutally brilliant (and hilarious) attack on artistic modernism, focusing specifically on Kramer's hero Clem Greenberg: modern art is nothing but illustrations for the insanely convoluted and incomprehensible scribblings of self-important twentieth-century verbalist intellectuals.

Similarly, Marxism assigns to intellectuals a far more exalted status than they would otherwise appear to deserve: whatever the ultimate metaphysical role of the proletariat, it is, in practice, the intellectuals, not the poor workers, who have grasped the Marxian dynamics of history. It is therefore the intellectuals who are fitted to run the show under Marxism.

That modernism and Marxism would appeal to intellectuals is therefore obvious. But does it matter? How could a small band of discontented intellectuals affect society at large?

Kramer again offers us hints of how relatively small numbers of leftist/modernist intellectuals spread their influence throughout American society. Kramer explains that Stalinists insinuated themselves into such "capitalist" institutions as Time magazine, the New York Times, and the universities, and, in some cases, received monetary subsidies from the Soviet Union.

The Soviets never accepted modern art, so Soviet funds were not available to fund artistic modernism. Curiously, funding for political leftists who espoused artistic modernism was provided by the American CIA! Kramer explains in some detail that the CIA-funded "Congress for Cultural Freedom" exhibited an "over dependence on the political Left as the intellectual mainstay of the Congress..." He adds approvingly, and not surprisingly given his own leftist leanings, that this "may indeed have been necessary given the realities of the moment..."

The most bizarrely fascinating essay in the book discusses the famous "Bloomsbury group" -- which included Vrginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, etc. The phrase "moral decadence" is not adequate to capture the picture Kramer paints.

For example, Vanessa Bell, sister of Vrigina Woolf and the pivotal figure in the group, although married to Clive Bell, had a child by Duncan Grant, whose own real romantic interest was not Vanessa Bell but his own gay lover, David Garnett. In a final weird twist, the gay lover Garnett ended up marrying the illegitimate daughter when she matured.

The Bloomsburyites, who prided themselves on their sexual openness and lack of hypocrisy, kept the whole strange matter secret from the unfortunate girl who thought her biological father was Clive Bell.

In the early twentieth century, the Bloomsbury ethos was the preserve of a tiny group of upper-class aesthetes -- although Bloomsbury member John Maynard Keynes did succeed in selling Western governments upon an economic theory built upon the take-no-thought-for-the-morrow Bloomsbury ethos, with a resulting near collapse in the value of Western currencies.

But that ethos has now trickled down widely to the middle and working class in America, as is illustrated, for example, by the infamous Jerry Springer television program: Springer is a twenty-first century pop-culture version of the Bloomsbury group.

As an old-fashioned liberal (what is nowadays called a "neoconservative"), Hilton Kramer is an apologist for the basic political, social, and cultural institutions of the twentieth century. While he deplores much of what his intellectual colleagues have done to our society, he lacks the vantage point to see that the early twentieth century liberal "advances" in the power of government, the structure of education, etc. made this destruction possible.

That Kramer himself is now often dubbed a conservative, rather than, as he himself confesses in his introduction, a liberal, is a sign of the lack of any real conservative alternative or response to the catastrophic social and intellectual decline that constituted the twentieth century.

Nonetheless, if Kramer can offer no cure, "Twilight of the Intellectuals" is a fascinating and readable look at some of those intellectuals who helped cause the illnesses from which we and our society now suffer.

Caveat.......2003-08-12

Although I have a great interest in the topic, and I found its title promising, I could not bear myself to finish this book. Besides acknowledging the acritical position of some intellectuals toward the Soviet Union and Stalin, I did not find much of interest in this book. Kramer's book is another exemplar of the usual tirade of rightwing intellectuals against the left and liberals in general. I found particularly deplorable Kramer's intend to rehabilitate the memory of Joseph McCarthy (See "The Blacklist Revised"). In this regard, even Ann Coulter is more refreshing.

Got my eyes on you baby cause you dance so good.......2001-07-18

With this book, Hilton Kramer, a Cold-War anti-Communist Liberal of the last half of the 20th century, fills in many historical gaps for younger seekers of intellectual purity. While the book does a credible job explaining shifting differences of cold-war opinion amongst leftist academics and ideologues, it begs us to consider how otherwise intelligent people could continue to support tyranny in the face of such incontrovertible evidence of its evil. Kramer cites the verbal and media assault on anyone daring to question the tenets of the Cold War Socialist Left. He outlines the criticisms of Alexander Solzhinitsyn by George Steiner, the diatribes of Lillian Hellman, that staunch supporter of Stalinism, and the scurrilousness of Mary McCarthy, the pro-Hanoi apologist. He shines light on the Communists in Hollywood and the media and the many ways in which they aided the Soviet cause.

Starting with the intellectual rejection of Whittaker Chambers, in favor of the Soviet spy Alger Hiss, we are treated to a travesty of heresies that have yet to be renounced by their proponents. Kramer points out that Bard College today has an academic chair in their Humanities department in Alger Hiss's name. By the same token, women's studies departments at many universities still use "I, Rigoberta Minchu" as a text even while knowing that she made the story up. Current Writers who have kept on with this tradition of making it up as they go along, in the name of the class warrior socialist cause, are Mike Barnicle of the Boston Globe, Stephen Glass of the New Republic, Joseph Ellis of Mount Hollyoke and Janet Cooke of the Washington Post; and these are just the ones who got caught. Even though they are a tribe of diminishing numbers, the shrillness of their followers is reminiscent of the Pod People in "the Invasion of the Body Snatchers". They still make their presence known in the universities, worshippers of their secular religion, their social studies professor's a fit for the over 50 white guy demographic of those remaining listeners of Pacifica Radio. Even with Cold War Left intellectualism "water over the dam", we still stand witness to the twilight of the intellectual era while we watch a continued post-modernist assault on free market values. In the war of ideas, they still fight on the side of our political enemies, and their fight is as relentless as it is prolonged. The saving grace is that their numbers continue to dwindle as their message becomes ever more diluted and confused. We can only sit in awe as we watch them "rage against the machine" and tilt at the windmills of free market capitalism. The Ruckus society, Greenpeace, PETA and Friends of the Earth come to mind.

The book outlines the details of urgent political debates that tore apart friendships and sundered institutions. Kramer gives life to these issues that animated controversies, but ended in the triumph of a new sensibility over modernism, what he calls a strange fate for liberal anti-communism. What's so interesting is how people like Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling and George Orwell were able to see the truth where other fellow travelers would not. It seems that the rigid ones suffered, and suffer still, from the condition that Thomas Sowell often refers to as compartmentalized brain syndrome. Hilton Kramer has done a fine job for those of us who are younger but still curious about this struggle of Cold war peripatetic's espousing their tale of the inevitability of a Marxist heaven on earth as the logical future for all mankind. This cruel plan, which oversaw the deaths of more than 100 million people in the 20th century, never succeeded and some of the credit has to go to those intellectuals with the courage to see the error of their ways. Hilton Kramer gives them their due.

An aerial view of the culture war.......2001-07-04

In a 1994 interview on C-SPAN's Booknotes, reporter and critic John Corry told how politically one-sided the _New York Times_' newsroom was in 1980. In that year, of all the reporters and editors on staff, he only knew of one person who voted for Ronald Reagan, and that was the paper's art critic, Hilton Kramer. Kramer left a couple of years later, continuing his art criticism in the _New York Observer_. But he also set out to do battle with the cultural Left, that "herd of independent minds", in Harold Rosenberg's famous phrase. Eventually, he founded the _New Criterion_, an intellectual journal, which features some of the finest cultural criticism on offer today. This book, Twilight of the Intellectuals, is as much a retrospective of his often lonely mission, as it is a survey of the political climate of American intellectual culture in this century.

_Twilight_ differs from Paul Johnson's _Intellectuals_ in treating only 20th century intellectuals. Plus, Kramer's high culture background allows him to provide the reader with more insight into his subjects' worlds, as opposed to Johnson's uniform tarring of his as scoundrels (mostly accurately, though). Kramer even expresses some nostalgia for some of the people here, such as Kenneth Tynan, giving him his artistic due over the political divide.

But in the main, his work here is a series of political polemics. "Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion," is how the Catholic intellectual Richard John Neuhaus described the mindset that Kramer battles here. Throughout, Kramer selects his old articles with the intent of fixing the truth about influential leftist intellectuals firmly in the cultural memory. People like Lillian Hellman, Alger Hiss, Dwight MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, and such are all known qualities now, and do not need to be refuted afresh. But they still hold places of honor in institutions where like-minded intellectuals cluster, so the task of telling the truth about them is an ongoing one. The progressive myth surrounding Hiss is still so thick that Kramer felt compelled to include two essays about his case.

His praise of Sidney Hook, the lone ranger of socialism, is fulsome, and deservedly so. Hook did much of the heavy lifting in building the Marxist mindset among American intellectuals in the Thirties, and then atoned for it with a long, noble and lonely career as an anti-communist cold warrior. He oddly tags Hook for a philistine, though, for having pooh-poohed an anti-communist arts festival with the comment that artistic greatness could appear in dictatorships, too. Hook was right on that point, though, in my opinion. A musical program of Shostakovich and Prokovieff at their best would more than stand comparison with a program of contemporaneous Western composers, caged birds though the Soviet artists were otherwise.

His estimation of Saul Bellow may be a little unfair. Bellow has never been known for being a brawler, which may explain Kramer's disappointment in his seeming acquiescence to PC attacks against him. One _Herzog_, one _Mr. Sammler's Planet_, ought to be enough to ask from any writer's career, without also being called upon to spend creative energy in opinion journal polemics.

A print reviewer of this book commented on how entering the culture wars must have retarded Kramer's potential as a critic, by draining his powers. I don't know about that, but he makes a convincing Horatius At The Gate, giving battle to the herd of independent minds, who marched in leftist lockstep so disgracefully, for so long.

Uncle Joe's Cafe.......2001-05-02

Like most people born in the Sixties, I was taught by the commissars to exercise proper moral outrage at McCarthy and to ridicule the excesses of anti-communism. It wasn't until I was well out of school, when I read Witness by Whittaker Chambers, that I realized there was another side to the story, one more deserving of my sympathy.

I learned that the excesses of the "Red Scare" had not proved it wrong. There had been Communists in Hollywood, in the media, in politics, and in government, including Alger Hiss, a State Department official under FDR who had been revealed to be a spy by Chambers, himself a former Communist.

Despite the exoneration of Chambers and the slow trickle of information about the Soviet Union after its fall, the Left has never come clean about its failures on this issue. Hilton Kramer tries to set the record straight in this collection of his essays, most of them published first in his monthly review, The New Criterion, by telling some of the individual stories within the intellectual history of the Cold War (roughly 1930-1990). Kramer examines the impact of the politics of the Thirties and Sixties and the gradual fall of what Raymond Aron called "the two avant-gardes," Marxism and Modernism.

These were the days of coffee-house revolutionaries who had either taken leave of their senses or were willing to do anything in the name of Stalinism. Some of them were acquaintances of Kramer; some were merely part of the cultural smog that everyone inhaled. They were divided into the Communist Left and the anti-communist Left, with the latter typically excommunicated whenever it attempted to reveal the truth about Stalin.

The excesses of the anti-anti-communists were many. Kramer found Sidney Hook's autobiography a key text in the literature of anti-communism, but historian Arthur Schlesinger thought Hook exaggerated the influence of Communism on America. Lillian Hellman claimed it was the anti-communists who were the real threat to democracy. Susan Sontag called the white race the cancer of history. George Steiner was outraged to hear Solzhenitsyn say it was Lenin, not Hitler or Stalin, who created the slave-labor camp and that Soviet terror was worse than National Socialism. Mary McCarthy defended Communism in Hanoi and attacked the anti-communism of a fellow Leftist, George Orwell. Alfred Kazin tried to drum Saul Bellow out of the club because Bellow departed from Left-liberal orthodoxy. William Phillips, an editor of Partisan Review, wrote that defectors from Communist idealism, like himself, were often denied entry into various journals and university jobs.

Book Description

Since the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the validity of Marxism and Marxist theory has undergone intense scrutiny both within and outside the academy. In LukÃ¡cs After Communism, Eva L. Corredor conducts ten lively and engaging interviews with a diverse group of international scholars to address the continued relevance of GyÃ¶rgy LukÃ¡cs’s theories to the post-communist era. Corredor challenges these theoreticians, who each have been influenced by the man once considered the foremost theoretician of Marxist aesthetics, to reconsider the LukÃ¡csean legacy and to speculate on Marxist theory’s prospects in the coming decades.
The scholars featured in this collectionâEtienne Balibar, Peter BÃ¼rger, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Leenhardt, Michael LÃ¶wy, Roberto Schwarz, George Steiner, Susan Suleiman, and Cornel Westâdiscuss a broad array of literary and political topics and present provocative views on gender, race, and economic relations. Corredor’s introduction provides a biographical synopsis of LukÃ¡cs and discusses a number of his most important theoretical concepts. Maintaining the ongoing vitality of LukÃ¡cs’s work, these interviews yield insights into LukÃ¡cs as a philosopher and theorist, while offering anecdotes that capture him in his role as a teacher-mentor.

A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism: From the Enlightenment to Marxism

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A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism: From the Enlightenment to Marxism
Andrzej Walicki
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
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ASIN: 0804711321

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The End of the Communist Revolution
Robert Daniels
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0415061504

Book Description

The End of the Communist Revolution puts Perestroika firmly in its long-term historical perspective as the final stage of a long revolutionary process, and within the context of Leninism, Stalinism and Breshnevism. Daniels puts forward a new interpretation of the striking events in the later half of the twentieth-century which led to the downfall of Gorbachev and Communism in the late Soviet Union. Embracing the whole Soviet experience since 1917, he argues that Gorbachev's reforms did not constitute a new revolution, but a `moderate revolutionary revival' with a return to the decentralist, anti-imperial principles that inspired the original moderate phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Emphasizing continuity with the past, Daniels questions conventional solutions about future political and economic alternatives in the region. By stressing the way that reform unfolded, not just in the Breshnev era, but in the long historical background, Daniels provides an original and integrated interpretation of Soviet history.

Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West

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Unconvincing
Double Lives: Double Cross
Lies without end
Messy but interesting
An eye opening and very interesting

Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West
Stephen Koch
Manufacturer: Free Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0029187303

Customer Reviews:

Unconvincing.......2007-01-10

The problem with Mr. Koch's entertaining thesis, that Hitler and Stalin colluded on releasing Dimitroff and having him exchanged for Germans in prison or detained in the Soviet Union is that Mr. Koch offers not a single name of somebody exchanged. Göring did want certain people exchanged (he wrote to the Foreign Office), and mentioned among others the names of Flaischle, Rohden, Wehrmann and Asche, but: as far as I can ascertain, these persons were not returned to Germany.
And: the scholarship is otherwise shoddy. On p. 104 Mr. Koch refers to the building behind the Reichstag as the 'official residence of the Reichspresident', whereas it was the official residence of the Reichstagspresident, i.e. the speaker of the house, i.e. Goering. That Mr. Koch doesn't know the difference between the Reichspresident (the Head of State, at this time Hindenburg) and the Reichstagspresident (the head of the Reichstag, the parliament, i.e. the Speaker of the House) says much about how sloppy the book is.
Michael S. Cullen, Berlin, Germany

Double Lives: Double Cross.......2007-01-04

Stephen Koch makes clear through the device of tracing some of the life of Willi Munzenberg that Stalin and Hitler were in cahoots through most of the 30s. Hitler's Anti-Bolshevism and Stalin's Anti-Fascism were merely window dressing to fool the democratic opponents to one or the other regime. Stalin's Soviet Union aided the Wehrmacht during the time when the Treaty of Versailles limited the size and capability of the German Army. Koch makes it clear that Stalin's duplicitousness continued right up until Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The cluelessness of many, if not most, Western intellectuals during this period is breathtaking from the vantage point of the post-Cold War world. What is more disturbing is the post-fact absolution of Stalin from complicity in Hitler's rise and his conquest of Western Europe. Anyone interested in the true history of post-WWI Europe should read this book.

Lies without end.......2006-04-12

Anyone interested in the ideas that have shaped the cultural and political face of the 20th century should read this book, because it sheds an uncompromising light on the activities which went on behind the scenes and identifies the strings which were being pulled to move the actors on the stage. More often than not the players remained completely unaware of the objectives they helped to promote, and their public was led by the nose, impressed by the cultural celebrities that showed them the way.

Stephen Koch's book, now available in its second printing (may there be a third!) highlights the communist undercover propaganda activities in the West that formed Moscow's ideological spearhead in the 1920s and 1930s. It tells the often tragic stories of the men and women doing the work who thought they were helping to create a better world and often ended up dangling from Stalin's gallows or as non-entities in the endless plains of the Gulag.

In the early days of the Bolshevik empire, this propaganda was aimed primarily at the capitalist countries, it was to promote the cause of the forgotten masses, to fight the lost but glorious causes of victims like Sacco and Vanzetti, to eliminate local rivals and to establish goodwill in intellectual circles. Capitalism was, obviously, the class enemy number one, but intially the campaign lacked a political foe, although Italian fascism, another liberatory ideology that sprang up after the first World War had at least given the enemy a name.

From that point of view, Hitler's sudden rise in Germany, spurred by the Depression which struck Germany hardest of all industrialized nations, was a godsend for communist cause. Now there was a way for Moscow to get a free entry ticket into the ruling circles of the Capitalist world. Stalin could now sell to the society he was trying to eliminate a glossy magazine describing Hitler's evil deeds, and the pitch was made so much easier because the claims could be verified on the spot - not many people toured the Soviet Union unaccompanied by local "guides". Anyone, more or less, was able to travel to Berlin or into the German provinces to view the astonishing - and to many people threatening - changes that were taking place there. For most observers it was preferable to get their goosebumps closer to home, in an environment they knew fairly well rather than attempt to satisfy their curiosity by visiting the Red Empire.

The person who had forged Moscow's propaganda organization abroad from the very beginning and who had immediately identified the new objectives by producing the "Brown Book" which blamed the Reichstag fire on the Nazi's themselves, was Willi Muenzenberg, a man born in Germany and one of Lenin's personal aides. Stalin supplied him with whatever means he needed to seduce the intellectual elites, both in Europe and in America, leaving to Willi the choice of the treatment - money, women, publicity - to be aplied in each particular case, be it Bertolt Brecht or Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway or Picasso, Andr? Malraux or the Mann family.

Anything that would disparage Hitler and his ideas would be used to advantage; the result was a world-wide political constellation of strange bedfellows, fundamentally opposed each other. At a critical moment it created a common groundswell which engulfed the center of Europe and pushed the rest of the continent to the edge of an abyss where it was to remain for half a century. To achieve his ends, Willi and the all-too-willing writers he had bought in one way or another were not afraid to use the Lie on a grand scale. Paris was their HQ. According to Stephen Koch, Malraux' report of a trip to Berlin he undertook in early 1934 to secure the release of Dimitroff was a fabrication and a fraud (p. 129f). Koch states that the "Oberfohren memorandum", supposedly a German account of the horrors perpetrated by the SA and published in the Manchester Guardian, was a "pure piece of black propaganda" (p. 157) written by one of M?nzenberg's men. Countless other such fabrications were circulated and poisoned the soul of western culture and civilization.

By 1939, once the Hitler-Stalin pact had allowed the great European War to start, however, Muenzenberg became expendable like so many other communists who fell from grace. Stalin eliminated the international activities which Moscow had so strongly promoted for more than two decades. When the German army moved into France, Willi fled south from Paris but never reached a safe haven in Switzerland or Spain. Many months later, his dead body was found in a forest on his escape route. Stephen Koch is hesitant as to how Willi died, whether by his own hands or by those of Stalin's men. He also allows for a Blitzaktion of the Gestapo, but this is unconvincing, because the Wehrmacht had not yet reached that area and even if the Germans had been looking for him and been aware of his whereabouts in those tumultuous days of the collapse of France, they would certainly not have failed to interrogate such an important personality before any act of revenge, whereas the Soviet Union, for both political and tactical reasons, would have been most eager to silence him at the first opportunity.

In spite of a few questionable theses, "Double Lives" is a highly recommendable book which can be placed alongside Christopher Andrew's "Mitrokhin Archive" and St?phane Courtois' "Black Book of Communism" without any reservations.

Messy but interesting.......2004-04-03

This book is badly edited and loaded with typographical errors; if it were a toaster, I'd call it defective and return it. Yes, it is an interesting addition to the literature of the Soviet revision. But the editing and the typos are horrible. You are left to figure out what word was meant -- does "writing" mean "writing"? is "ind" really "find"? -- and doing so continually interrupts the narrative.

An eye opening and very interesting.......2004-01-08

This is the kind of book that makes you ask yourself every few pages "did you know that?!", "how come I didn't know this!", and "how come nobody talks about this!"

It is really a good portrait of those grim times in Europe. It exposes the workings and everyday life of the real spies. It gives the "bad guys" you heard about or saw only in movies a real face. Full of detail that does not bore but expand the palette of colors.

Even if you are not interested in history or politics you should read this. I have tried to find other books on Muezenberg and I recently came across "The Red Millionaire" by Sean McMeekin, which I intend to read soon.

I think more investigating journalism should be done about other dark myths of our recent history. We have to look more critically at the people who want to mold our minds.

Book Description

This book offers a comprehensive analytical comparison of the democratization process in twelve countries of East Central Europe and the Balkans. It characterizes the types of democratization which have occurred in the region from 1989 until the end of 1997 and sets these recent changes within the framework of the political history of the countries.

Emerging Democracies in East Central Europe and the Balkans takes a unique look at the democratization process using evidence which is not readily available in the existing literature. It examines less well-known countries including Albania and Macedonia, and more complex countries such as Serbia. Atilla Agh analyzes the political, parliamentary and party developments from a comparative perspective both within the countries themselves and within the region as a whole. Considering all countries within the same theoretical framework, he also examines the long-term historical dimension and legacies of political culture. In addition, he analyses the goals of achieving Euro-Atlantic integration and the preparation for full membership to NATO and the European Union. Finally, he compares these new democracies with developments in Southern Europe and Latin America. This book will be welcomed by scholars and students of comparative politics and politics of emerging democracies as well as government officials and policy makers.

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It's too easy way of thinking about East-Central European.......1999-04-01

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Legacies of the Collapse of Marxism
John H. Moore
Manufacturer: University Publishing Association
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

A penetrating study by prominent authors of the aftermath of the collapse of Marxism. Rudolf Andorka discusses the causes of the collapse of the Communist system; Francis Kukuyama looks at the varieties of Russian nationalism; Craig Calhoun addresses the interaction of nationalism, civil society, and democracy; James M. Buchanan analyzes the implications for economies in transition of the asymmetrical reciprocity in market exchange; Robert Conquest discusses academe and the Soviet myth; and Seymour Martin Lipset concludes with the question of why we did not anticipate the failure of Communism.

Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History (Routledge Studies in Social & Political Thought,)

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Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History (Routledge Studies in Social & Political Thought,)
Stuart Sim
Manufacturer: Routledge
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding

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Book Description

This book traces the crystallisation of post-Marxism as a specific theoretical position in its own right. It examines the history of the development of the Marxist tradition as well as considering the school's future prospects.

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