History of the Communist Party USA the retiring head of the party, William Z. Foster, published a book entitled "Toward Soviet America", which laid out the Communist Party's plans for revolution and the building of a new socialist society based on the model of Soviet Russia. In that same year, Earl Browder became General Secretary of the Communist Party. At first, Browder moved the party closer to Soviet interests and helped to develop its secret apparatus or underground network. He also assisted in the recruitment of espionage sources and agents for the Soviet NKVD. Browder's own younger sister Margerite was an NKVD operative in Europe until
The Revolution Betrayed sensational public announcement of the first of three great public Moscow Trials generated by the secret police terror known to history as the "Great Purge" ("Ezhovshchina"")". When Trotsky became aware of the trial, which would ultimately end in the execution of Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and other prominent Soviet political figures, a short postscript was tagged on to his introduction in which Trotsky claimed that his current book constituted "advance exposure" of the Stalin regime's effort at "deliberate mystification." "The Revolution Betrayed" has been characterized by historian Baruch Knei-Paz as Trotsky's "major work on Stalinism" and constituted the chief primary