John Earl Haynes (born 1944) is an American historian who worked as a specialist in 20th-century political history in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.
He is known for his books on the subject of the American Communist and anti-Communist movements, and on Soviet espionage in America (many written jointly with Harvey Klehr).
During the late 1970s, Haynes served as a legislative assistant to Wendell Anderson, a Democratic Governor of Minnesota named to replace Walter Mondale in the US Senate when the latter was elected Vice President of the United States.
[1] Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union during the first years of the 1990s, sensitive archives in Russia began to tentatively be opened to scholars.
[2] Haynes was later instrumental in helping to forge a December 1998 agreement between the institutional forerunner of today's Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), keeper of the Comintern documents, and the Library of Congress which led to the microfilming of the CPUSA collection and its sale to academic institutions.