How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley
By Steven T. Usdin
"Engineering Communism provides a fascinating look at a virtually unknown facet of Cold War spy lore, the story of two Americans who worked with the Rosenbergs to transfer American military technology to Russia, and went on to help found the Soviet computer industry. Highly recommended reading for anyone interested in an age we have quickly forgotten, in which Americans could become committed Communists and risk everything for the sake of ideology."
—Francis Fukuyama (Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy, The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; Author of "The End of History and the Last Man")
“Usdin tells a fascinating and tragic story about the victims of Marxist ideology and also about the incompetence of the FBI. Not only a good read, his book also has policy relevance for today’s concerns with reforming the Intelligence Community.”
—William Odom, Lt. General, USA, retired, former director of the National Security Agency and author of America’s Inadvertent Empire and Fixing Intelligence
An incredible true story of espionage, the Cold War, and tangled dramas of love and betrayal
Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley (Yale University Press) is the amazing true story of Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, dedicated Communists and members of the Rosenberg spy ring who stole information from the U.S. during World War II that proved crucial to building the some of the USSR’s most advanced weapons systems.
Usdin brings his subjects to life, drawing on extensive interviews with Barr and many people who knew him and Sarant in the U.S. and the USSR, and new archival evidence. Unlike most accounts of espionage, Engineering Communism tells in Barr’s own words why he became a spy. Engineering Communism provides new insights into the Rosenberg spy ring, including the fullest account to date of technology it gave the KGB and how it was incorporated into weapons that were deployed on battlefields from Korea to Vietnam.
Engineering Communism reveals how Barr and Sarant obtained military secrets, and details FBI blunders that led to their escape. Usdin’s depiction of counterintelligence failures “has policy relevance for today’s concerns with reforming the Intelligence Community,” according to Lieutenant General William E. Odom, US Army (retired), former director of the National Security Agency.
By explaining why American communists risked their lives to commit crimes on behalf of a power opposed to the basic tenets of modern society, Engineering Communism also answers questions that are essential to constructing a defense against 21st-century terrorists.
Chronicling Barr and Sarant’s success in convincing Khrushchev to build a secret Silicon Valley, an entire city near Moscow, Usdin illuminates the origins of Soviet high technology. He describes the two Americans’ role in designing the USSR’s first transistorized computer, inventing new microelectronic devices, and designing a computer that is still being manufactured and used in Russian submarines that have been sold to China, Iran and India. He also pinpoints the root causes of Soviet technology’s failure to live up to the potential of its scientists and engineers.
Engineering Communism tells an incredible personal story of Barr’s dual lives in Leningrad with his Czech wife and children and with a married Russian mistress who bore him two children. It follows the two spies through Sarant’s death, Barr’s unbelievable return to the United States after more than four decades, and the reconciliation of Sarant’s common-law wife with the husband and children she had abandoned in America.