The Cambridge Five cover art

The Cambridge Five

A Captivating Guide to the Russian Spies in Britain Who Passed Information to the Soviet Union During World War II

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The Cambridge Five

By: Captivating History
Narrated by: Colin Fluxman
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About this listen

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
Education Great Britain War Espionage England Student Imperialism Soviet Union
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What listeners say about The Cambridge Five

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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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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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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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Great

I still believe this is a great book for someone who wants to read about a true story of a westerners experience in Cold War Soviet Union, and understand exactly how life was like under the pressure of Cold War tensions and the Soviet State’s paranoia about western spies during this turbulent time.

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A fascinating audio-book

A fascinating memoir set in Oxford and Moscow in the mid-1960s by the leading social historian of the Soviet Union in the West.

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