I recently started listening to the Cold War Podcast and I'm up to the episodes taking about the Cambridge Five. What was going on then that allowed the Russians to recruit so many effective spies from such a small location in a relatively short time period? It seems almost too good to be true (from a Russian view) that there were so many disaffected and communist-leaning students to choose from at the University.
Hey OP, I thought we touched on the answer to that in the show? My take on it is that WWI and the Great Depression convinced a lot of Western progressives that capitalism had some serious flaws and they were looking to socialism to provide some answers. In the 30s they were still willing to overlook/forgive a lot of the Soviet's worst flaws as it was the only major implementation of socialism on a state-level. Also, there are suggestions that certain members of the C5 thought they would be offered sweet positions of power in the new Soviet order after the capitalist countries collapsed after the Great Depression / WWII played out.