Ever since mainlining every episode of The Americans I could get my hands on, I’ve been obsessed with the spy games the Russians and Americans played during the Cold War. So I was interested to read, in the Washington Post, that once upon a time the CIA launched an anti-Soviet mission using not murder, not torture, not intrigue—but literature as its weapon.
During the Cold War, the CIA loved literature — novels, short stories, poems. Joyce, Hemingway, Eliot. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov.
Books were weapons, and if a work of literature was unavailable or banned in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe, it could be used as propaganda to challenge the Soviet version of reality. Over the course of the Cold War, as many as 10 million copies of books and magazines were secretly distributed by the agency behind the Iron Curtain as part of a political warfare campaign.
The CIA as a distributor of millions of free books? That’s pretty astonishing in an age when the CIA is more known for its controversial interrogation (i.e. torture) tactics, and when the weapon America most often uses against its enemies is manned drone strikes.
In 1958, the CIA’s literature-distribution program came to focus on a single novel: Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak was a novelist who was unafraid of the communists, though he knew that his book would not be well-received in Russia. The (book-loving?) CIA knew it too. Here’s CIA Russia Division chief John Maury, in a July 1958 memo:
Pasternak’s humanistic message — that every person is entitled to a private life and deserves respect as a human being, irrespective of the extent of his political loyalty or contribution to the state — poses a fundamental challenge to the Soviet ethic of sacrifice of the individual to the Communist system.
The whole article—which is adapted from a forthcoming book—is fascinating, and really worth a read. The world of publishing can be an intricate one, with intrigues regarding intellectual property rights, print runs, and a host of other complications. Reading about how this world intersected with the cutthroat world of spies and intelligence is surreal. The CIA’s Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago was, ultimately, illegal, as it infringed on the publication rights of Pasternak’s Italian publisher, who argued against the print run even as the CIA denied any involvement. Most astonishing of all, though, was the CIA’s hope that the illegal distribution of the novel in Soviet Russia would not only galvanize the world in favor of the United States and turn the Russian people against the Soviets, but earn Pasternak a Nobel Prize—a prediction that later turned out to come true!
Reading the article, I couldn’t help but wish that people still regarded such innocuous little things as books as being powerful enough to change the course of history. Books, art, ideas—these things are often more powerful than weapons. I’m reminded of how the Arab Spring was aided by people speaking out on blogs and social media, and how Twitter was recently banned in Turkey. It’s hard not to think about the places where there is trouble in the world—places where religious violence or totalitarianism dominates, where women or gay people are routinely persecuted—and dreaming about which books, which ideas, you would send there to be passed in secret from person to person.
If you could bomb a country with books, what books would you send, and where?
