Mr. Brent's undertaking was literally what its title says: the annals of Communism; that is, a selection from 400 million secret documents of the former Soviet Union, to be translated and published in 25 to 50 volumes. The first 5 volumes had by now been published--to a concentrated lack of enthusiasm from the establishment. In this absorbing exchange, Mr. Buckley and his guest explore the possible reasons for this (among them that the establishment didn't want to know that the Communist Party in the United States had been engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union), but some of the most fascinating bits are Mr. Brent's simple description of the difficulties of negotiating the deal ("The Russians ... had no idea what the list price of a book was. They had no idea what a royalty was") or of the physical state of the Soviet archives ("You don't understand. The Russian archives are completely falling apart. They don't have Xerox machines. In the archive of the Red Army, for the chief archivist to turn on the light in her office, she opens the drawer of her desk, she takes out a light bulb, she stands on a chair and screws it in. And on more than one occasion, these archives--imagine, the Red Army archive, the archive of the Central Committee ... --have been closed because they cannot pay their electricity bills or they cannot pay the guard who stands outside with his submachine gun").