On a Field of Red [antikvár]

Authors' Note In writing about the Communist International—more generally known as the Comintern—that organization created by the early leaders of Soviet Russia to bring about the downfall of the capitalist states and engineer the world revolution of the proletariat, the authors have made no effort to provide a formal history of the Comintern. Nor have we set out to examine any changes that the activities of the Comintern may have wrought in the social fabric of western civilization. What we have concerned ourselves with are the intrigues and subversive operations of the Comintern, attempted both with and without the assistance of the Soviet intelligence services, in three countries—the United States of America, Great Britain, and Germany—and how Comintern policy in concert with Soviet revolutionary diplomacy contributed to the coming of World War II. We have thus focused on the narrow but decisive front of Soviet efforts to undermine the capitalist democracies and, coincidentally, of the efforts of the democracies not only to protect themselves but also to undermine Soviet Bolshevism. Those efforts on both sides created a very thick stew from which Nazism and world conflict emerged. Since Comintern doctrine specified that the world was indivisible and that what happened in Peking, New Delhi, or Madrid had its effects in Washington, London, and Berlin, we found it necessary on occasion to go beyond the