John Earl Haynes, Ph.D.
Dr. John Earl Haynes is a prolific author and scholar on the subjects of communism and communist organizations in America. Haynes was educated at Florida State University, the University of California, Berkeley, and at the University of Minnesota, where he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. Before retiring, he served as 20th Century Political Historian in the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division. Haynes and his research partner, Harvey Klehr, were the first historians to gain access to several long-closed major archives, including the Communist International and Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) records in Moscow, the decrypted Soviet cables of the National Security Agency’s Venona project, and the KGB archival notebooks of Alexander Vassiliev. Haynes was later instrumental in helping to forge a December 1998 agreement between the institutional forerunner of today’s Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), keeper of the Comintern documents, and the Library of Congress, which led to the microfilming of the CPUSA collection and its sale to academic institutions. He is the author or co-author of twelve books, including The Secret World of American Communism, Spies: the Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era, and In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage, with Harvey Klehr.
