Ultimately the failure of communism was its economy.

books:

	• World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World Christopher Andrew, Vasili Mitrokhin Basic Books, 2006 - 676 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Not much is new here...

Although I enjoyed most of this book, the main facts aren't new. Only details are new, but those details often do not have much consequence anyway. So this book is great for those who study spy agencies and for the scholars who study the role of the KGB. But for the average person, it's a long book that doesn't teach you much about Soviet foreign involvement that you haven't already heard from western anti-communists during the cold war years.

In this book, we find much on how the KGB tried to recruit agents and seduce leaders that may be brought under Soviet influence, how they set up residencies in embassies, how they "distorted" the facts to please the politicians in Moscow, how they dealt with intelligence operations that failed, how they fabricated documents to mislead both their friends and their opponents, etc.

What you get from this book essentially is great insight in the minds of the people who were running foreign residencies for the KGB. If you are not already aware of it, you also learn about Soviet involvements in the third world, but if it's what you're mainly interested in you can find other books that deal with this subject more directly. Finally, this book also gives much information about the tough relationship between Russia and China, which we don't know that much about in the West; I found this aspect particularly interesting.

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The KGB Thrived in Democracy's Failure

I agree with Robert Kaiser's take on this work in the introductory review, that much of the assembled facts here were already known or surmised at the time of its publication. The rubric of "newly revealed secrets from Soviet archives" was one of the biggest cons of the American publishing industry in the 1990s.

This book underscores another Western shortfall as well - that the success of Communism in the world from 1917 on was directly related to the "Democracies'" unwillingness to put its rhetoric into practice. This extended with a vengeance into the Third World in this book's timeframe. In Cuba, as a prime example, the US refused to intervene against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista's misanthropic reign - with which the US possessed leverage - and instead vainly attempted to thwart the Castro regime, with which it possessed none. This blinkered US policy, based only on the short term interests of American investors in Cuba, laid the groundwork for Castro's defection and the KGB's penetration into the Western Hemisphere.

Similarly, the unquestioning US subsidy of Israel's Mideast grand strategy likewise gave the KGB entry into the Middle East. American unwillingness to come to grips with its own racial problems in the 50s and 60s, and similar ambivalence regarding anti-colonialism in Africa, ensured that black Africa would seek constructive engagement with the Kremlin while Washington pursued it with Pretoria.

The KGB's successes here were all in proportion to Western - specifically American - failure of vision. These successes would have been far greater than even Mitrokhin suggests, were it not for the KGB's own hamstrung bureaucratic mentality.

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Nice continuation to Volume I

The book is a very interesting continuation to the first volume of the metrokin archive. I would howerver like to point out that at the middle of the book the form of writting of the book becomes very dull because all the charpters are prepared in the same way. To be fair probably from a scientific point of view this is the most correct form to do so, however at some point the reader becomes a bit bored. Chapters that speak of Iraq, Syria, Israel and Afganistan are very interesting, specially because they purport the russian or soviet point of view for strategical analisys. Nevertheless its a good book and provides good information.

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Ultimately the failure of communism was its economy.

It is a well written study of how the KGB tried to manipulate and fight the cold war in the third world.

I was a bit disappointed though after reading at the start how this new and great archive was now available. Yet little of it is presented here. Overall there seemed little radically new in the book although there are some new and interesting points.

For example in South Africa, I never realized how much the USSR and South Africa must have traded during the apartheid era in diamonds.

The writers argument which I think is correct is that the KGB was one of the major means used by the Soviets to spread communism throughout the world. Often they were more inventive and clever then their enemies. Unfortunately for the USSR, either the form of communism that took shape in these third world countries produced a rival for example China or they became a major drain on the Soviet economy. Often they were played by the locals just like the US.

At the end of the Cold War, in the third world as in many other fields the Soviet's economy could not afford the price.

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History of the KGB

Comprensive story of how the KGB operated, and how they corrupted so called democratic leaders in the world. Very good, interesting for espionage amateurs.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

The second volume of stunning revelations from the archives of the KGB-covering the Soviets' vast operations around the world, from the Middle East to Latin America, Africa and India

In 1992 the British Secret Intelligence Service exfiltrated from Russia a defector whose presence in the West remained a secret until the publication of The Sword and the Shield in 1999. That man was Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB's most senior archivist. Unknown to his superiors, Mitrokhin had spent over a decade making notes and transcripts of highly classified files which, at enormous personal risk, he smuggled out of the KGB archives. The FBI described the archive as "the greatest single cache of intelligence every received by the West."

In The Sword and the Shield, Christopher Andrew revealed the secrets of the KGB's operations in the United States and Europe; now in The World Was Going Our Way, he has written the first comprehensive account of the KGB and its operations throughout the Third World. Our understanding of the contemporary world remains incomplete without taking into account the vast impact of the KGB in developing nations: Andrew reveals the names of political leaders on the KGB payroll as well as the KGB's successful penetration of numerous foreign governments. He also points to the many absurdities of KGB operations-such as agents attempting to assess the spread of influence of rival Chinese communism by visiting African capitals and counting the number of posters of Mao Tse Tung.

For decades the KGB believed that the world was going their way-and Americans at the highest reaches of government lived in fear that they were losing the Cold War in the Third World. This extraordinary book will transform our understanding of the history of the twentieth century.

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