Remedial: 2:3 of the Almanac Singers' early record labels were run by active Soviet agents.

The Cold War came after WWII. Your venture capitalists were George Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (VOX) & Marian Distler (Folkways.) The latter was one of the longest suffering souls ever walked the halls of a record label. Not.a.spy.

Let's do the easy one first. Noel Meadow (Stinson) wasn't a 'spy' either. Propagandizing the U.S.S.R. wasn't illegal in the U.S.A.. Fill out all the proper forms; call it 'art' & 'publicity;' good to go. Artkino advertised in Billboard.

Herbert Harris (Stinson) managed the Artkino concessions in their chain of American cinemas. The morning the Nazis invaded the U.S.S.R. – Meadow & Harris were running movies and news reels trying to put a smiley face on Molotov-Ribbentrop. And selling out the whole of the Western European left & center in the process. What a difference a day made, 24 little hours.

Stinson distributed Asch records through the Artkino concessions. Profits from those sales financed the recording studio. Garden variety capitalism with apolitical Jazz at the Phil (Granz) and Wayfaring Stranger (Ives) as top sellers & cash cows for the milking. Plus the content of every Russian record label ever nationalized for the artists' royalty & rights-free bootlegging.

That Stalinist brand of 'venture' capital and 'popular' is not coming back and that's a good thing.