The Soviet World of American Communism.

• Author: Ybarra, Michael J.

In 1920 Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Communist International, better known as the Comintern, dispatched a secret diktat to the two fledgling American parties that had registered competing claims to the Bolshevik franchise in the U.S. The Comintern, sort of a Russian housemother of the worldwide revolutionary movement, ordered the two squabbling groups to merge and even decreed a name, more hopefully than realistically: the United Communist Party. But the hapless Soviet courier fell into the arms of the police and most aspiring Leninists in the U.S. read their instructions in the New York World. Which is not to say that they followed them very well. Soon there were three American Communist parties; then there were two again, although the fact that they had the same name and each published a journal called the Communist makes one feel sorry for the poor Bureau of Investigation (forerunner to the FBI) agents who had to try to keep all of this straight. Once again the Comintern laid down the law, this time printed on a thin swatch of silk that the Soviet messenger could presumably tie into an ascot to slide by the authorities, if not the fashion police. "The further postponement of the unification of the two Communist groups is a crime against the Communist International," the scarf commanded.

Just like the Cominterns confidential instructions turning up in a newspaper, the American party's fealty to Moscow was no great secret. Nevertheless, it's a significant service for Yale University Press to finally publish Moscow's actual marching orders, as it has done in a recent volume of documents culled from the Comintern's archives. The Soviet World of American Communism is the second installment of this ongoing project.

While it's hard to overestimate the value of the series, it could have been edited better. The two extant volumes are not without overlap, redundancy, and padding. It might not be the greatest of Soviet crimes, but someone should mourn all of the forests felled to print Communist drivel; it's a shame to see Klehr, et al unnecessarily contribute to this wastage.

Moreover, the authors write with a sense of vengeance, overreacting, I would say, to the rampant and often foolish revisionist scholarship on American Communism, which has often portrayed the party as the moral equivalent of the Boy Scouts. Too much time spent in the airless archival world of American Communism can make anyone's prose more blunt and accusatory than need be...