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  • The Cambridge Five

  • A Captivating Guide to the Russian Spies in Britain Who Passed Information to the Soviet Union During World War II
  • By: Captivating History
  • Narrated by: Colin Fluxman
  • Length: 1 hr and 24 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (22 ratings)

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The Cambridge Five cover art

The Cambridge Five

By: Captivating History
Narrated by: Colin Fluxman
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Summary

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Cambridge Five, then pay attention....

During the poverty-stricken years of the Great Depression, when Britain’s financial markets plummeted and the poor and wealthy alike doubted the economic systems in which they participated, the potential of one political ideal shone like no other: Communism. Young intellectuals from the country’s very best schools discussed the premise of labor-value versus wealth-value, and a great many of them became card-carrying members of the Communist Party in Britain.

It was exactly the kind of hunting ground the Soviet Union needed to recruit high-level agents to their cause. Over the course of the early 1930s, five students of Cambridge University were handpicked by Soviet agents and instructed to use their status as educated members of the British elite to serve the U.S.S.R.

Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, and John Cairncross accepted the offer and in doing so changed the course of WWII and the Cold War. Their actions were not discovered until the 1950s, long after the war was finished and the damage - or achievements, depending which side you were on - had already been done.

In this audiobook, you will discover topics such as:

  • The undeniable attraction of Marxism
  • Students of prestige
  • Anthony blunt: teacher, lover, recruiter
  • Burgess: a mole within the BBC
  • Maclean and the Spanish Civil War
  • World War II: espionage between Allies
  • Enigma, Bombe, and Colossus
  • Espionage and the battle of Kursk
  • Project Venona
  • Allied insurgents in Albania
  • The downfall of the Cambridge Five
  • And much, much more!
©2019 Captivating History (P)2019 Captivating History

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What listeners say about The Cambridge Five

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    4 out of 5 stars

Interesting if not perfect

This is an interesting romp through the relevant history although it could have focused more on the spies’ stories rather than on the historical background. The reader has a very annoying delivery and an infuriating way of mispronouncing data although he manages incorrectly once!

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Fab advice.

This great book ably describes the shift between Tsarist Russia with all its ills and evils and Soviet Russia with many of the same ills under a different name. I think the title is appropriate, though indirectly. Diplomacy, ideology and methods are at the heart of the subject, but spies and commissars are the result.

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Nice Book

The rulers of Soviet Russia aimed to reconstruct the entire edifice of life for the benefit of the working class --- and if workers did not yet understand where their best interests lay, the communist party would simply carry out the Revolution on their behalf."

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A detailed book

The subject matter is interesting and you can learn from this book, but it didn't hold my attention and it was a struggle to complete it. In most cases, no person who is able to organize, index, footnote, and complete a book of this nature should get one, two, or three stars, but a four is fair in this case. Thank you

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Suggested

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about either the Brezhnev period, daily life in Moscow, or the process that encompasses researching for a dissertation. The memoir is a solid testament to her prodigious career as a Soviet Historian.

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Awesome

It gives short thrift to the civil war and the non-Bolshevik revolutionary parties, but does a nice job of covering the personalities that drove the country from the last days of the Great War to the 20s.

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Thanks

This excellent book is a description of extremely complicated entanglements of personalities and institutions, of politicians, spies, reporters, lovers and assassins (Fanny Kaplan among them) and is a vast micro-history which adds another dimension to the most famous revolution of the twentieth century. Highly recommended!

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Thumbs up!

Myopic in their own domain, the criminal cadres of Sovarkom wanted to see it outward. But for sympathies in the West, they could have smothered on their excuses for failure.

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Simple to understand

This book answered all of my questions regarding the origin of Soviet paranoia, spying networks, secret agents, secret police and the like. I disagree with the reviews that say how the book is heavy-handed, meant for scholars generally. This reads almost like a novel.

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A wonderful read

The importance of this book will only grow as time passes and Sovietologists who lived and worked during the seventy-four years of the Soviet Union begin to retire and pass on their accounts as spies. the divide, and one cannot but become entirely absorbed in the awful, fascinating tragedy that The Cambridge Five.

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