Reinhold Kramer – författare

After Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko defected in 1945, Canada was shocked by the revelation that its own citizens were engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. P.S. Burn After Reading explores how the Canadian government used the controversial Kellock-Taschereau Commission – sometimes judiciously, sometimes not – to uncover and thwart domestic spies during the early days of the Cold War. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including the Commission’s extensive records, GRU documents turned over by Gouzenko, American Venona decrypts, Soviet KGB archives, and newly released British MI5 and MI6 files, authors Reinhold Kramer and Tom Mitchell provide a comprehensive account of the crisis. They reveal that, despite some civil liberties missteps, the government’s suspicions were largely justified. The book weaves together the evidence against the spies, the tradecraft of Soviet espionage, complex legal challenges faced by the state, and the political fallout. With access to hundreds of newly released British intelligence files, P.S. Burn After Reading offers both specialists and general readers fresh insights into the espionage crisis of 1945–46 and the pivotal role it played in exposing Canada’s postwar security and intelligence vulnerabilities.

The Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, which involved approximately 30,000 workers, is Canada's best-known strike. When the State Trembled recovers the hitherto untold story of the Citizens' Committee of 1000, formed by Winnipeg's business elite in order to crush the revolt and sustain the status quo.This account, by the authors of the award-winning Walk Towards the Gallows, reveals that the Citizens drew upon and extended a wide repertoire of anti-labour tactics to undermine working-class unity, battle for the hearts and minds of the middle class, and stigmatize the general strike as a criminal action. Newly discovered correspondence between leading Citizen lawyer A.J. Andrews and Acting Minister of Justice Arthur Meighen illuminates the strategizing and cooperation that took place between the state and the Citizens. While the strike's break was a crushing defeat for the labour movement, the later prosecution of its leaders on charges of sedition reveals abiding fears of radicalism and continuing struggles between capital and labour on the terrain of politics and law.

In this book, Reinhold Kramer explores a variety of important social changes, including the resistance to objective measures of truth, the rise of “How-I-Feel” ethics, the ascendancy of individualism, the immersion in cyber-simulations, the push toward globalization and multilateralism, and the decline of political and religious faiths.