The Spying Game

The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era, by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev (Random House, 382 pp., $30)

INUNDATED by new Cold War scholarship based on liberated Soviet-bloc archives, the informed reader is entitled to ask what each new example of the genre adds that is truly interesting. Yale University Press is sponsoring a series of books on such topics as Soviet manipulation of the American Communist Party, and the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project has provided continuing revelations on Soviet foreign policy. What Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev have to offer here that is truly extraordinary is their unprecedented (and probably never to be repeated) access to NKVD (now KGB) files.

PW

About the Author

Peter W. Rodman

The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era, by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev (Random House, 382 pp., $30)

INUNDATED by new Cold War scholarship based on liberated Soviet-bloc archives, the informed reader is entitled to ask what each new example of the genre adds that is truly interesting. Yale University Press is sponsoring a series of books on such topics as Soviet manipulation of the American Communist Party, and the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project has provided continuing revelations on Soviet foreign policy. What Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev have to offer here that is truly extraordinary is their unprecedented (and probably never to be repeated) access to NKVD (now KGB) files.