Books, Arts & Manners: The Red and the Brown

Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas against the West, by Stephen Koch (Free Press, 404 pp., $24.95)

THE name Willi Münzenberg is familiar to readers of Arthur Koestler and Manes Sperber, writers whose chronicles of European and German Communism first told us of his work on behalf of the Comintern. But it has been the unique task of Stephen Koch, who was able to utilize material hidden until recently in the archives of the former Soviet Union, to tell us the whole story of how this remarkable Comintern operative fashioned a widespread network of agents—“Münzenberg’s men,” as Mr. Koch calls them—who created a propaganda apparatus that gained the allegiance of the most prominent writers, intellectuals, artists, and politicians in the major capitals of the Western world.

About the Author

Ronald Radosh

Mr. Radosh, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and a contributing opinion columnist at the Daily Beast, is a co-author of Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War and the author of Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left.

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Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas against the West, by Stephen Koch (Free Press, 404 pp., $24.95)

THE name Willi Münzenberg is familiar to readers of Arthur Koestler and Manes Sperber, writers whose chronicles of European and German Communism first told us of his work on behalf of the Comintern. But it has been the unique task of Stephen Koch, who was able to utilize material hidden until recently in the archives of the former Soviet Union, to tell us the whole story of how this remarkable Comintern operative fashioned a widespread network of agents—“Münzenberg’s men,” as Mr. Koch calls them—who created a propaganda apparatus that gained the allegiance of the most prominent writers, intellectuals, artists, and politicians in the major capitals of the Western world.

About the Author

Ronald Radosh

Mr. Radosh, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and a contributing opinion columnist at the Daily Beast, is a co-author of Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War and the author of Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left.