The opening of the archives of the former Warsaw Pact countries has provided scholars with new insights into relations among Communist states. Laurien Crump has tapped into Romanian, German, and Italian archives, as well as recently published primary sources, to reconsider the Soviet Union's control over its Communist partners from the formation of the Warsaw Pact to the year after the suppression of the Prague Spring.
Surprisingly, the documents cited in the book do not signficantly change the history of the Cold War. Crump has basically confirmed what many long knew—that the Communist world was repeatedly fraught with serious divisions. This was a long-standing phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, Marxists were split between revolutionary Communists and evolutionary social democrats. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks squabbled in the early twentieth century, and the fatal division between the German Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party in the early 1930s divided the German...