"Thomas Sakmyster relates all in his wellresearched, informative and easy-to-read biography. Between his arrival in Moscow and his death in the same city Pogány was, for most of the time, a Comintern agent, sent to different countries to assess the situation and sometimes generate pro-communist disturbances.
A fiery brand of Hungarian red pepper - Sakmyster covers the intriguing American period of John Pepper - as Pogány now called himself - in detail. Pepper comes across as someone who was disruptive rather than unifying. The American communists didn’t quite know what to make of him, this messenger from “Mecca”, as they used to call Moscow. “Pepperism” became a term, both in the US and Moscow, to describe the latest line that he happened to be promoting"
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