The Ultras in the USA

A history of the American right from the National Association of Manufacturers to George Wallace, and a better book than a reader approaching a Moscow title on American politics has any reason to expect.

It is built out of the Congressional Record, hearing transcripts from the Government Printing Office, presidential memoirs, the American academic literature, and the ultra-right's own press - the John Birch Society's monthly is cited across a decade and a half. There are more than five hundred endnotes, and the great majority point at documents an American reader could have checked in an American library.

That matters, because most of what the book describes happened, and much of it was still being minimised in mainstream American accounts available at the time. The Smith Act prosecutions, the loyalty programme, the Attorney General's list, the Hollywood blacklist, the purge of the left from the CIO unions. Nikitin's figures on the loyalty programme are the government's own, running into millions of forms processed and name checks run.

His account of the machinery is exact and unhysterical. He quotes the chairman of the Loyalty Review Board telling investigators they need not give an employee the reason for his discharge, and sets out with precision the trap facing a witness before a congressional committee, who risked prosecution under the Smith Act if he admitted party membership, perjury if he denied it, and contempt if he declined to answer.

He is good, too, on the long American pedigree of the thing, and lets Americans say so - opening with I. F. Stone on a red menace older than the Reds.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.