 These were the years when Socialist Party students often moved to the left to join the Communist Party, and Norman came under the tutelage of John Cornford, who soon went to Spain and was killed in the Spanish Civil War.However, while his politics were left leaning, there is a controversy as to whether he became a communist and, more importantly, whether he was a Soviet spy afterward, as were other Trinity students, such as Guy Burgess.Norman entered the graduate program in Japanese history at Harvard University in 1936, where he studied under Serge Elisséeff, the Russian émigrée Japanologist.