Books: The Pests

SOVIET ESPIONAGE (558 pp.)—David J. Dallin—Yale University ($5.75).

And the incorruptible Professor walked . . . averting his eyes from the odious multitude of mankind. He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force . . . He walked frail, insignificant, shabby, miserable—and terrible in the simplicity of his idea calling madness and despair to the regeneration of the world. Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in a street full of men.

Thus Joseph Conrad, in The Secret Agent (1907), gave a prophetic portrait of that now familiar pest of the West—the Communist...