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

By Stephen Koch

Book Overview

Double Lives explores the subterranean role of Stalin's propaganda agents. Ernest Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, Andr Malraux, Maxim Gorky, and Andre Gide are among a host of great writers who were the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0029187303
• ISBN13: 9780029187302
• Release Date: December 1993
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 419 Pages
• Weight: 1.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.5" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Lies without end

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 Br

An eye opening and very interesting

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.This is a very valuable book.

"Anti Fascists" Exposed

Stephen Koch interviews the wife of master propagandist Willi Muenzenberg, who reveals the facts behind her husband's publishing empire. From Hollywood leftism, to well known writers, to support for Communist spies. This man, who watched Lenin leave the train station and was himself murdered by Stalin's henchmen, started the "perpetual apology" of Communism so prevalent then... and now.

Everything you know is wrong: The REAL 1930s

According to conventional history, in the 1930s Stalin became alarmed about Hitler and organized an international anti-fascist movement to oppose him. HA! Now that some of the archives of the ex-Soviet Union have been opened (OH! How I love to type "ex-Soviet Union"!), it turns out the whole thing was a con from begining to end. The reality: Stalin was determined to make a deal with the Nazis from the word go. He organized the "Popular Front" as a cover for this, as a distraction for the Great Purge, and, probably, as a means of getting Hitler in a war with the West. The details Koch presents would be unbelievable if they weren't documented (for instance, Soviet Espionage assigned women to seduce and marry selected non-Soviet writers, as a means of manipulating them in the cause of propoganda!). I can't rave about this carefully researched, beautifully written book enough. FIND A COPY AND READ IT!

The Manipulators Exposed

Stephen Koch's largely unheralded 1994 volume Double Lives, subtitled Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West, concerns itself with a careful examination of the extensive and intricate secret propaganda campaign of the Lenin and Stalin-era Soviet Union to globalize Communism, and demonstrates how an ambitious German opportunist by the name of Willi Münzenberg successfully manipulated notable Western writers and artists into participation in this propaganda network. Koch's work answers a number of questions which have recently been brought up by conservative commentators, like Michael Medved, in discussing the role of Hollywood and the entertainment industry in so-called "Culture Wars". Double Lives demonstrates how Willie Münzenberg, operating as a legitimate German publisher and politician, oversaw a massive media empire of newspapers, magazines, and film companies, covertly financed by the USSR, that guided Western fellow travelers and Communist sympathizers. The list of notables successfully targeted by Münzenberg and his cohorts reads like a veritable "who is who" of leftist European and American intelligentsia. Ernest Hemingway, Romaine Rolland, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Lincoln Steffens, and Bertolt Brecht were just some of the many intellectual and literary cogs in Münzenberg's propaganda and espionage machine. While some, like Andre Gide, quickly grew disillusioned and broke with the apparatus, most stayed the course preferring to gloss over the more gruesome aspects Stalin's regime in their unfailing reverence for the Communist ideal. Koch skillfully illustrates how Stalin used the anti-Fascist movement as a cover while he and Hitler made arrangements through their respective secret services to dispose of domestic enemies. Likewise, Koch discusses at length how Münzenberg's protégé and right-hand man, a Czech Jew named Otto Katz, created, expanded, and eventually presided over an extensive espionage network that included Bloomsbury's John Strachey, the notorious Cambridge spy ring, and, in America, Whittaker Chambers and his friends Alger Hiss and Noel Field. It would be no great exaggeration to say that the cultural history of the Western world from the 1930's on was profoundly influenced by Münzenberg's and Katz's minions and their intellectual progeny. Koch presents ample evidence that Münzenberg's agents wielded considerable influence with the Los Angeles and Hollywood cultural elites via such fronts as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Hollywood League for Democratic Action. While Willie Münzenberg and Otto Katz were both eventually exterminated by the very Stalinist regime that they so faithfully and effectively served, we need not lose sight of the fact that the pro-Communist seeds that they helped sow in America during the first half of the century have by all accounts begun to beat fruit in the latter half. By successfully Stalinizing the already leftish entertainment busines