Inside the left.

Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism, edited by Ellen Schrecker (New Press, 304 pp., $27.95)

IN the middle of an essay about recently discovered evidence of Soviet espionage, historian Maurice Isserman inadvertently defines the chief appeal of this new anti-anti-Communist anthology edited by Ellen Schrecker: "The student of history, from the vantage of the 21st century, may find it more interesting ... how these documents were used than what they contained."

Like Oliver Stone's JFK, this book fascinates because of the collective self-portrait these essayists offer--in this case, that of a reactionary Left, desperately seeking to avoid the dustbin of history but refusing to embrace new arguments to escape this fate. Some updated information is allowed--the Soviets were internally repressive, American Communists did spy for the Soviet Union--but like the Right of their imagination, these essayists want to freeze history at a particular moment. Their moment of choice is the Vietnam era, in which terms like military-industrial complex (mentioned 62 times in this book) have a totemic power to stifle opposing viewpoints, and in which there is no distinction between vital-center liberalism and the Right (indeed, in this work, Harry Truman--a man who castigated McCarthy as a greater threat to civil liberties than the Kremlin, and the FBI as an "American gestapo"--comes off as more of a fascist than J. Edgar Hoover).

This outdated prism is most evident in the essays by Isserman, Schrecker herself, and Bruce Cumings. Schrecker's nostalgia for the "stability and peace" of a Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe echoes the New Left apologetics for the Warsaw Pact of such luminaries as Herbert Marcuse. Cumings, writing about the Reagan era, pines for the countercultural organs of the 1960s--apparently forgetting the trenchant criticism of the Reagan administration by Gary Sick and Christopher Hitchens. Because the 1980s lacked a journal like Ramparts, Cumings finds the decade barren of anti-establishment criticism. Isserman expends the most energy at being contemporary: He concedes that the subjects of the Left's causes celebres--the Rosenbergs, Harry Dexter White--were indeed Soviet spies. But even he seems bored with the present. It is only when he recreates the contextual reasons for becoming a Communist that he becomes truly excited ("they were going to change the world"; "they were marching for new brotherhood"). One imagines him humming the "Internationale" as he types.

This pining for the past undermines the essayists' advertised tone of "nuance," of complicating the Right's Cold War triumphalism. In a sense, they have advanced beyond what anti-Communists such as Arthur Koestler accused them of: fixating on the East. In these essays, their focus never leaves the U.S. Nuance, for them, means defining in detail the totalitarian aspects of Cold War America, but never those of the Soviet Union--odd, since several of them define the Cold War as a symbiosis between two entities feeding off and depending on each other. If the Cold War was akin to a chess game, with moves and countermoves, we are shown only one player.

For all the ink they use to justify why people became Communists, they refuse to understand why others became conservative. Perhaps the omission is deliberate: To understand why the Right is so numerous and self-congratulatory today would make readers reflect uncomfortably on the Left and its half-century of euphemisms, apologetics, and spins on behalf of Communism. For decades, Ellen Schrecker portrayed the American blacklist as a "reign of terror" (but where are the decapitated heads, the cackling crones?) while remaining silent on the Soviet purge trials. The academic Left lionized Soviet spy Alger Hiss first as a New Deal martyr to McCarthyism and later as a patriotic antifascist, worthy of having a chair in history named after him at Barnard College. Until the academic Left has its own perestroika, this book must stand as an accurate and chastening self-portrait.

Mr. Capshaw's work has appeared in Partisan Reviewand American Book Review. He is currently working on a biography of Alger Hiss.