Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain

13 Hot Books in the Cold War

13 HOT BOOKS IN THE COLD WAR Ever since the Lay of Igor’s Campaign and Nestor’s Primary Chronicle, the written word has had a special, almost magical quality for Russians. . . . Precisely because the literate were a minority, books were objects of awe and veneration. . . . This aspect of literature is at least as important today as it was a hundred years ago. — , The Russians and Their Favorite Books The knigonoshi were the book bearers of the tsarist era, Russians who traveled to the West on business or pleasure and returned home with forbidden books, often by bribing border guards to avoid government controls on the import of foreign literature. This chapter, however, is about modern knigonoshi who brought Western literature to the Soviet Union, circumventing the strict controls imposed by communist ideologists. Books played an important role in the westernization of the Soviet Union and the winning of the hearts and minds of many Russians. Russians love books, and they are widely read and treasured in a country where people were largely illiterate less than a century ago. James R. Millar, now professor of Russian studies at George Washington University, recalls how a Russian student came to his dormitory room at Moscow State University one night in  on a mission that could have gotten him into serious trouble with the authorities. The student had an English-language copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, a forbidden book, which he was translating into Russian, and he needed help with some of Nabokov’s colloquial English terms.1 The Soviet Union published more copies of books than any other country, and yet there was always a book hunger there. The simple explanation is that publishing was a state monopoly, and the state was publishing many books that Russians did not want to read, or the ones they wanted to read were not published in sufficient numbers to meet popular demand. Soviet censorship was depriving readers of books that would have become bestsellers. Moreover, while censorship of books has a long history in Russia, the Soviet Union had eliminated illiteracy, and book hunger was no longer limited to the intelligentsia but had become a mass phenomenon. It is, therefore, ironic that a regime which had dramatically raised the cultural and educational level of its citizens, could not supply the books that they wanted to read.  . James R. Millar, author’s interview, Washington, D.C., June , . After the death of Stalin an underground system of typed and retyped manuscripts , mainly works by dissident Russian authors at home and abroad, began to circulate among the intelligentsia. To meet the demand for such books in Russian that could not be printed or purchased in the Soviet Union, two employees of Radio Liberty, Isaac“Ike”Patch and Betty Carter, modern day knigonoshi, came up with the idea for the Book Program, as it was called in . Its purpose, writes Patch, was “to communicate Western ideas to Soviet citizens by providing them with books—on politics, economics, philosophy, art, and technology—not available in the Soviet Union.”2 Patch’s proposal got the enthusiastic support of Howland H. Sargeant, president of the Radio Liberty Committee, who approached the CIA with a request for funding. The Agency came through with a modest initial grant of ,, which as the book program grew, eventually came to more than a million dollars a year. The Bedford Publishing Company, headed by Patch, was established as a private venture, funded by the CIA but separate from Radio Liberty, to publish Western works never before translated into Russian. From its main office in New York and branch offices in London, Munich, Paris, and Rome, Bedford distributed books to Soviet visitors to the West and Western visitors to the Soviet Union. Among the translated books were such classics as James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror. Over the years, Bedford and its successor organizations distributed to readers in the Soviet Union more than a million books, most of which are believed to have reached their destinations as evidenced by letters to the distribution centers. According to Patch,  percent of the books were given to Soviet travelers in the West—engineers, teachers, artists, students, and journalists. Another  percent were given to Western travelers to the Soviet Union—doctors, lawyers, teachers, and engineers. Ten percent were mailed to people in the Soviet Union authorized to receive...