This stunning book, based on KGB archives that have never come to light before, provides the most complete account of Soviet espionage in America ever written. In 1993, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev was permitted unique access to Stalin-era records of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States. Years later, living in Britain, Vassiliev retrieved his extensive notebooks of transcribed documents from Moscow. With these notebooks John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have meticulously constructed a new, sometimes shocking, historical account.
Along with general insights into espionage tactics and the motives of Americans who spied for Stalin, Spies resolves specific, long-seething controversies. The book confirms, among many other things, that Alger Hiss cooperated with Soviet intelligence over a long period of years, that journalist I. F. Stone worked on behalf of the KGB in the 1930s, and that Robert Oppenheimer was never recruited by Soviet intelligence. Spies also uncovers numerous American spies who were never even under suspicion and satisfyingly identifies the last unaccounted for American nuclear spies. Vassiliev tells the story of the notebooks and his own extraordinary life in a gripping introduction to the volume.

Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America

History

John Earl Haynes

Harvey Klehr

Alexander Vassiliev

Americas

Yale University Press

An unprecedented exposé of Soviet espionage in the United States during the 1930s and 40s This stunning book, based on KGB archives that have never come to light before, provides the most complete account of Soviet espionage in America ever written. In 1993, former KGB officer Alexander Vassiliev was permitted unique access to Stalin-era records of Soviet intelligence operations against the United States. Years later, living in Britain, Vassiliev retrieved his extensive notebooks of transcribed documents from Moscow. With these notebooks John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have meticulously constructed a new, sometimes shocking, historical account.
Along with general insights into espionage tactics and the motives of Americans who spied for Stalin, Spies resolves specific, long-seething controversies. The book confirms, among many other things, that Alger Hiss cooperated with Soviet intelligence over a long period of years, that journalist I. F. Stone worked on behalf of the KGB in the 1930s, and that Robert Oppenheimer was never recruited by Soviet intelligence. Spies also uncovers numerous American spies who were never even under suspicion and satisfyingly identifies the last unaccounted for American nuclear spies. Vassiliev tells the story of the notebooks and his own extraordinary life in a gripping introduction to the volume.

Mr. Harvey Klehr

Based upon previously secret KGB records, The Haunted Wood reveals for the first time the riveting story of Soviet espionage's "golden age" in the United States throughout the 1930s, World War II, and the early Cold War. Historian Allen Weinstein, author of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, and Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB agent-turned-journalist, were provided unique access to thousands of classified Soviet intelligence dispatches that documented the KGB's success in acquiring America's most valuable atomic, military, and diplomatic secrets. The Haunted Wood narrates the triumphs and failures of Soviet operatives and their American agents during the 1930s and 1940s, describing as well the compelling human dramas involved. Reconstructed from Moscow's messages to its operatives and reports from Soviet recruits in America, The Haunted Wood describes many previously unknown personal tales: struggles for control among contending Soviet operatives and American agents, love affairs, business ventures, defections, and plotted or actual murders. The authors also detail the remarkable range of classified government documents and information stolen for Soviet intelligence during the 1930s and the war years. Complementing its use of the KGB archives, The Haunted Wood incorporates, also for the first time, a number of the previously classified VENONA cables released in 1995-96 by the CIA and NSA. Among these thousands of translated intercepts sent by Soviet agents in the United States to the USSR during World War II were dozens that matched those found in the Moscow records. The highly placed Americans who assisted Soviet intelligence operatives during this period included: the passionate daughter of the U.S. Ambassador to Nazi Germany an influential member of the U.S. Congress one of President Roosevelt's personal assistants key officials of the OSS, America's wartime spy agency a flamboyant Hollywood producer-director the head of the American Communist Party Several chapters provide major new accounts from Moscow's own record of its relations with Alger Hiss and atomic spies Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Theodore Hall, and Julius Rosenberg, among others, along with fresh information on Soviet espionage in the United States by British agents for the Kremlin--Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Harold "Kim" Philby. The Haunted Wood's pages are filled with extraordinary and previously untold stories, including those of one war-time American spy ring whose head lived in a domestic ménage à trois with other agents, of Soviet involvement in a Hollywood music publishing company and possible major film investments, and of a station chief who proposed (with Moscow's agreement) funding U.S. journalists and congressional political campaigns. The authors show how defection at war's end by a single emotionally depressed agent, despondent since the death of her Soviet station-chief lover, provoked the swift and virtually complete shutdown of Moscow's intelligence operations in the United States--ironically, years before the FBI and congressional investigations began their decade-long pursuit of "Soviet agents," who, by then, had either returned to Moscow or left the U.S. government! With its new and uniquely documented information, The Haunted Wood offers the first fresh, realistic, and non-judgmental understanding of Soviet espionage in the United States during the Stalin era.

The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America - The Stalin Era

Allen Weinstein

Random House]

Children's Fashion of the Russian Empire

Over a 35-year period, a renowned fashion historian Alexander Vasiliev collected antique photographs featuring portraits of Russians in the olden days.  Children's Fashion of the Russian Empire came to be as a unique edition dedicated exclusively to children's clothing that had been worn in the cities of imperial Russia, and is based on the selection from Vasiliev's antiques.  The very first photographs in this volume date back to the late 1850s when such images only just appeared in the country as pictures pasted on cardboard.  The timeline of this collection ends with 1917, the year the Old Russia ceased to exist.  Featuring over 400 photographs from the author's collection, Children's Fashion of the Russian Empire is a spectacular visual medium. This album of pretty tailored children's dresses for all occasions takes the viewer back in time and into the fascinating, unforgettable epoch in Russian history.

Children’s Fashion of the Russian Empire

Glagoslav

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Books by Alexander Vassiliev