> The books on the Amerasia spy case and the Rosenbergs are solid,
I don't know. I skimmed the R book a long time ago; the Schneiers, who proved beyond doubt that the Rs were framed (which doesn't mean one or more of them were not guilty) have said in the Nation that the Verona material supports Radosh's view that Julius if not Ethel was a spy, and they'd know better than I. Be that as it may, I was struck by the narrowly legalistic approach, essentially prosecuterial, accumulating evidence of spying. No attention to context, no acknowledgement that I recall of the Schneier's results, no reall attention to context, no evaluation of the significance of the material supposedly given to the Russians, absically an attempt to show that there were reds under the bed. As I say, a yawn even if he was right as far a he went.
> Justin mentions, Merle Fainsod. I'm under the impression, the rightward
>Sovietologists seethed that Jerry Hough revised a Fainsod classic, "How the
>USSR Is Ruled." Still, the can't be that p.o'ed still. I saw that Hough has
>a letter in the latest National Interest.
Hough was a "revisionist" of the Skilling school who thought that the USSR under Brezhnev was acheiving a sort of grey normality as a stable postStalinist society. A lot of us thought that back then. Who know, maybe we were right. He was big advocate of detente. After perestroika started, he got really strange. His "revision" was nothing on Fainsod's orifinal, I got rid of my copy of Hough's How the Soviet Union is Governed and kept my copy of Fainsod's How the Soviet Union is Ruled. F's book on Smolensk under Sovet Rule, based on secret archives captured from the Nazis, is a classic.
> Re:Robert Conquest. Last of his, "Reflections on a Ravaged Century,"
>has
>a blurb from Christopher Hitchens.
As a philosopher, Conquest is a windbag. His books on the terror, the famine, and Kolyma, are excellent, although he inevitably errs in favor of the highest death tolls. Supposedly he's a poet too, but I've never read any of his poetry.
> jks
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