Fascinating book review at Reason Magazine

Reason: Fools for Communism: Still apologists after all these years: "First, in 1992, the post-Soviet government of Boris Yeltsin threw open the Communist Party's records, including the enormous collection of documents held by the Communist International, or Comintern, which directed the affairs of foreign Communist parties during the first half of the century. Two years later, the Russian SVR, the cash-strapped successor to the KGB, allowed brief and limited access to some of its old files to a handful of Western historians in return for a substantial gratuity. And finally, in 1995, the U.S. government released thousands of KGB cables intercepted and decoded in the 1940s in a top-secret operation known as Venona. In all, some 2 million pages of new documents became available, a historical payload of unfathomable proportions and inestimable impact.
The new picture of American Communists that emerged looked nothing like the one painted by the revisionists. The CPUSA was founded in Moscow, funded from Moscow (as late as 1988 Gus Hall was signing receipts for $3 million a year), and directed by Moscow; the Comintern reviewed everything from the party's printing bills to its public explanations of the nuances of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and the slightest misstep could bring scorching rebukes."
Via Fr. Jim.