From Russian revolutionary to CIA agent in one generation

A short weaponized immigrant story.

I haven’t had much of a chance to write over the last month, but I’ve been reading a lot — mostly things that give some background to my family’s early Soviet history, which has led me to Lenin and Stalin and Luxemburg and some Kautsky and Trotsky. That’s what happens when you try to probe the depths of the Nationalism Question that was being debated and fought over at the beginning of the century. I’ll get into that later. But reading Lenin and his attacks on the notion that Jews in the Pale of Settlement constitute a distinct and separate nationality reminded me of a great forgotten Lenin biography that I keep wanting to mention.