Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 11, 1995 TAG: 9504120084
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
Among their discoveries, the historians said Monday, was a previously unknown network of American Communists, answering to Soviet officials, that was assigned to penetrate the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.
The researchers also reported finding documents that support Whitaker Chambers, the government's key witness against convicted spy Alger Hiss. Although Hiss' name is not mentioned in the documents, they back up Chambers' claims about a Communist underground in Washington in the 1930s.
The researchers, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, said the new data from former Soviet files should force extensive revision of the era's history and cause pain to scholars who have long contended that the Communist Party of the USA had no spying role.
``What historians think about American communism in the 1930s is the premise for how they write about anti-communism in the Cold War era,'' said Haynes, a Library of Congress historian.
The material, 150 million documents from 1919 to 1943, originally were in central files of the Soviet Communist Party, Haynes said.
Klehr, Haynes and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, a Russian historian and archivist, co-wrote ``The Secret World of American Communism,'' published by Yale University. and presented at a news conference. The second book, ``Stalin's Letters to Molotov,'' reveals what its editors said was important new material on the Soviet dictator.
Klehr, a professor of politics at Atlanta's Emory University, said some of the Communist Party of the USA material previously was known or rumored, but only now supported by documents.
The trio's book says the ``dominant perspective'' among academic historians for 20 years - that the U.S. party was simply a home-grown, populist party with radical views - no longer is valid.
A call to the U.S. party's headquarters was answered by a woman who said Carol Marks, assistant to General Secretary Gus Hall, was not available for comment.
Among what the authors said were new or confirmed discoveries:
The American party was very much a part of Communist International, or Comintern, founded by V.I. Lenin in 1919 to encourage and support communist activities in other countries.
Earl Browder and Eugene Dennis, who successively were chairmen of the U.S. Communist Party from 1934 to 1959, maintained a ``secret apparatus'' for espionage that answered to the Soviet NKVD, forerunner of the KGB, helping the Soviets spy on Americans.
ma The American party's underground maintained secret ``informant and
influence'' groups in U.S. government agencies, copying confidential documents sent to President Roosevelt and State Department officials.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***