decisions based on long-established norms, it should be no surprise to see that “active measures” against Moscow’s adversaries continued despite the fall of the Soviet empire.

The Russian hand in American leftist politics was visible and distinctive already by 1919, as soon as pro-Soviet Communist groups had been organized on our shores. No previous radical movement in this country owed its financing or loyalty to a foreign government. Nor did any earlier protest organization carry out periodic membership purges or maintain an underground apparatus and a military section, as required of American Communists by the Communist International or Comintern.

In the hundred years since the Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg the Russian regime and its agencies consummated a series of operations aimed mainly at undermining the United States, some ofwhich were breathtaking in their audacity and success. For example, the Russian use of business relationships to gain influence is hardly new. The late Armand Hammer, creator of Occidental Petroleum Corp., was designated by Lenin himself as a favored capitalist agent for the Russians.

Nor is the manipulation of protest parties new. In 1924, a third “Progressive” Party ran Senator Robert M. LaFollette, a Wisconsin Republican, as an alternative presidential candidate to the successful Republican incumbent, Calvin Coolidge, and the Democrat John W. Davis. LaFollette received nearly five million votes, or 17 percent of the total, but won only his home state, with 13 electors. His campaign was marred by Communist infiltration under the direction of the Comintern.

Russian blandishments involving Republican personalities, including some from New York, are therefore