This essay reviews a recent book by Serhii Plokhii, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union . Focusing on the role of the USSR's union-republics, especially Russia and Ukraine, in the breakup of the country, the book explains why efforts to hold the Soviet Union together ultimately proved abortive. The book, like earlier literature, debunks tenacious myths about the dissolution of the Soviet Union—myths that have been discredited before but are worth rebutting again—and provides an in-depth account of the final weeks of the USSR.

This essay discusses the memoir of Boria Sax, the son of Saville Sax, a U.S. citizen who was a Communist and Soviet spy during World War II. Saville Sax failed at most things he attempted, but he proved to be a valuable asset for Soviet espionage agencies because he was the roommate of the gifted physicist Theodore Hall, who was recruited to work for the Manhattan Project. Sax convinced Hall, who shared Sax's admiration of the Soviet Union, to supply highly sensitive information to the Soviet foreign intelligence service. The memoir offers a poignant view of the terrible impact that Saville Sax's actions had on his family as well as on the country he betrayed.

The United States has long sought to promote a lasting peace settlement between Israel and the Arab countries. That objective has outlived the Cold War, but the Middle East was a particular flashpoint during the Cold War because of the prospect that the two superpowers might become directly involved. Moreover, the Soviet Union's strong political and military backing for Arab governments often worked against U.S. efforts to broker a peace settlement. This essay reviews two recent books that trace the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East after the creation of Israel in 1948. The Cold War accentuated a basic problem that has persisted after the Cold War; namely, that several of the leading parties to the conflict are less intent than the United States on achieving a durable peace settlement.

This essay looks at two recent Italian books about the evolution of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Drawing on archival materials, the books trace the conflict between the radicals and the reformers within the PCI's ranks, a conflict that gave way to violent splinter groups that regarded the PCI as too staid and conciliatory. As the far left took a violent turn in Italy in the late 1960s, it paved the way for the spasm of grisly far-left and far-right terrorism in Italy in the 1970s and early 1980s. The books lend weight to the view that the PCI, through its exaltation of Communist revolution and its demonization of the Christian Democratic establishment, facilitated the emergence of extremist groups that perpetrated more than 8,400 terrorist attacks in the latter half of the 1970s.

Andrei Ledovskii, a long-time Soviet diplomat with a particular expertise on East Asian affairs, and several other Russian specialists on Soviet policy in the Far East have published a massive collection of declassified documents about Soviet policy vis-à-vis China in the first five years after World War II. The authors seek to show that the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war was attributable to Soviet fraternal help, that Josif Stalin wholeheartedly embraced the Chinese Communists' struggle for power, and that the Sino-Soviet alliance from beginning to end enjoyed unstinting Soviet support. But in fact the documents reveal that Stalin's policy toward the Chinese Communists was opportunistic and utilitarian, that he refrained from decisively supporting the Communists in the Civil War until almost the end, and that all the talk of proletarian internationalism in the Sino-Soviet alliance was but a cloak for Soviet expansionist ambitions in East Asia.

This essay reviews a new biography of Agnes Smedley, a radical American writer and journalist who secretly worked for the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party on various endeavors, including espionage. When Smedley was accused in the late 1940s of having been a Soviet spy, she staunchly denied the allegations and depicted herself as an innocent victim of a McCarthyite smear. Ruth Price, the author of the new biography, initially expected to find that Smedley had indeed been unjustly accused of spying for the Soviet Union. But as Price sifted through newly available materials from Russia and China, she made the disconcerting discovery that Smedley had in fact eagerly served as an agent of influence and spy for the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists. This case illustrates some of the complexities that arise when assessing why certain Western intellectuals and government officials decided to become spies for the Soviet Union.