Volume 41, Number 11 · June 9, 1994
Were the Atomic Scientists Spies?
By Thomas Powers
Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness—A Soviet Spymaster
by Pavel Sudoplatov, and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with L. Jerrold, and Leona P. Schecter, foreword by Robert Conquest
Little, Brown, 509 pp., $24.95
When wars end the belligerents begin to speak and write about what happened—indeed, their willingness to tell the truth is one sign that the fighting is really over. Truth-telling about the cold war took a new turn following the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and there has been no pause since in the flood of memoirs, documents, and declassified files published or simply opened to the public in Moscow and other capitals of onetime members of the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet murder of thousands of Polish army officers at the Katyn Forest in 1940, Stalin's agreement to let Kim Il Sung's armies invade South Korea in 1950, the crimes and triumphs of the KGB and other Soviet intelligence organizations, and a long list of other revelations, large and small, eventually will make it possible for scholars to write a true history of the cold war.
Review, 6125 words
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