This publication is a comprehensive selection of unique documents pertaining to the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) from the formerly closed archives of the Communist International.

This is a comprehensive selection of documents pertaining to the Communist Party of South Africa from the formerly closed archives of the Communist International.

This publication is a comprehensive selection of unique documents pertaining to the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) from the formerly closed archives of the Communist International.

The Hidden Thread is a journey of revelation about the relationship between Soviet Russia and South Africa, hidden for most of its length. The story is told with insight and depth by Irina Filatova and Apollon Davidson, who have had a decades long association researching and writing on Russian and South African politics and history. This insightful work follows the often surprising twists and turns of the history of South Africa's relationship with Russia and its people which started in the eighteenth century and is still very much alive today. The story evolves from the Russian volunteers who fought alongside the Boers in the Anglo-Boer War to South Africans who participated in the Russian revolution and civil war; from the Russian Jewish immigration to South Africa to the close involvement of the South African communists in the Communist International; from the Soviet consulates in South Africa and the activities of South Africa's Friends of the Soviet Union Society during the Second World War to the vicissitudes of the Cold War and the 'hot' war in Angola; from the SACP and ANC's relations with the USSR to the volte-face of perestroika and South Africa's transition and to today's business, political, cultural and sometimes criminal connections between Russians and South Africans.

This book is a "first" in South Africa. No volume like this has ever been written! It fills a gap in a field of conservative literature that has been waiting to be filled for over half a century. A volume packed with facts, scrupulously researched, and backed up with almost 1,000 documentations, it offers for the first time to all interested South Africans an exhaustive history of the communist conspiracy and related events in their land, from its origins in the mid-1850s through 1984. - Jacket flap.