The Rosenberg letters : a complete edition of the prison correspondence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg /

This is the first complete version of the prison correspondence of the Rosenbergs. What the editor would like the world to conclude is that his controversial parents were naive Marxists who were framed by the US government for political reasons during the early Cold War years, 1950-53. Meeropol hopes for a reopening of the case to clear the reputation of his parents as spies for the Soviet Union. This task will be made more difficult by the allegations of Soviet spy master Pavel Sudoplatov, in Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness (1994), who charges that the Rosenbergs were indeed low-level spies and committed communists who took a fall for world communism rather than reveal their knowledge of other members of the spy network. What comes through in Sudoplatov's book, but not in Meeropol's, is that the Soviets were quite willing to use the Rosenbergs in a pernicious way as a propaganda symbol in support of a Marxist Cold War victory. They were both soldiers for and dupes of Stalin's plan. Sadly the US itself helped Stalin in this endeavor by executing them and making the Rosenbergs martyrs for the secular religion of Marxism. Upper-division undergraduates and above. S. Prisco III; Stevens Institute of Technology