Hot Books in the Cold War : The CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program Behind the Iron Curtain

Chapter 9. A Lasting Enemy

Chapter 9 A Lasting Enemy Part I: The Censors 1956 to 1968 Much has been written about the internal state censorship system of the East European communist regimes modelled after the system launched by the Bolsheviks as early as October–November 1917. Emulating the Soviet model of central censorship office established in 1922, known as “Glavlit,” the authorities achieved within their borders complete state control over the press and all communication media by being the sole providers of everything needed by the publishing industry. This economic control, from printing presses and typewriters to newsprints, also applied to periodicals and publishing houses. In fact, censorship was not even needed because nothing could be printed that did not suit the communist regimes. Yet it was still useful as a means of double-checking and double screening. Only with the advent of the Russian model of samizdat literature in the 1970s and 1980s in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary did a form of private publishing emerge in defiance of the state prohibition to own capital and material means for the mass production of intellectual products. Genuine freedom of the press occurred briefly during the 1968 Prague Spring period in Czechoslovakia and later in 1980–1981, when the Solidarity labor union was allowed to operate publicly. As a result of censorship, contradictions and compromises governed literature, theatre, and films under communist rule. The creators of cultural life were both censored and kept satisfied for decades by a variety of means. Membership in the official writers’ union and toeing the party line provided material security through a steady job and guaranteed income in the form of state subsidies. In some cases, writers, i5 Cold War.indb 125 2013.03.04. 13:37 126 Hot Books in the Cold War artists, and filmmakers were bought off and/or forced to exercise selfcensorship by keeping views critical of or divergent from “socialist realism” out of their works. Finally, coercion or suppression awaited those who did no echo the party line. For several decades, Eastern Europe’s writers, playwrights, and filmmakers spent considerable creative energy on finding arrangements with the guardians of culture and/or cleverly slipping political points past the censors’ vigilance in their books, plays, and films.1 The large-scale mailing of Western and émigré books in the second half of the 1950s, followed in the early 1960s by the even larger hand-to-hand distribution of such books to East European visitors to the West, represented another major challenge for the communist regimes’ cultural watchdogs. Many, if not most of these books, could not be printed, were unavailable, or, in the case of works by émigrés, were outright banned. Throughout the existence of the book program, one of its most enduring aspects was the cat-and-mouse game between two quasi-invisible antagonists. On one side were the many providers of uncensored printed matter in the Free World. These providers included hundreds of existing book publishers, libraries, and academic institutions, less numerous fictitious organizations set up to prevent the identification of the actual source, and a sizeable contingent of book distributors, most of them in Western Europe. The distribution of a steadily growing flow of Western books and periodicals, many of them banned, from such a large number of seemingly unconnected sources to a growing number of individuals and institutions behind the Iron Curtain aimed at both confusing and overwhelming, through its sheer size and scope, the declared enemies of free thought and expression. On the other side of Europe’s intellectual and cultural divide stood the 1  Lettrich, The Writers in Eastern Europe. See also George Schöpflin, ed., Censorship and Political Communication in Eastern Europe (London: Francis Pinter, 1993), and George Gömöri, “Censorship in Communist Ruled Countries from 1945 to 1989 (A Survey),” paper delivered at the International Conference “Censorship as a Creative Force? Central Europe 1944–1989,” UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London, April 25, 2008. See also the papers by Miklós Haraszti and István Hegedűs on censorship in Hungary, John Bates on censorship in Poland, and Antonín Liehm and Jan Čulík on censorship in Czechoslovakia. Ibid. On freedom of the press, see Evers, Liberty of the Press under Socialism, 94–103. i5 Cold War.indb 126 2013.03.04. 13:37 127 A Lasting Enemy phalanxes of vigilant Polish, Czechoslovak, Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian postal censors and customs...