Battle of the books
The US government is banning the same authors it once used to fight Soviet censorship.
PEN America’s latest list of titles pulled from US school libraries makes grim reading. It contains more than 10,000 instances of removed books, many of which are written by our greatest authors. Here, to pluck out a few names, are Aldous Huxley, Boris Pasternak, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Kurt Vonnegut Jr is a particular favourite of the book-banners: his name appears fifty times. So, too, is George Orwell, whose Animal Farm and 1984 have been removed on 13 occasions in all. We might think this is an American problem, but British schools are far from immune: a recent survey of school librarians in the UK found that 53% had been asked to remove titles from their shelves, many for depicting LGBTQ+ themes.
There is a huge irony here, of which the people calling for the suppression of literature in, say, Clay County, Florida, must be unaware. This is that the CIA smuggled work by all the authors listed above (and many others) into the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, in a bid to demonstrate the advantages of life in the free-thinking West and undermine Soviet censorship. A vital democratic freedom, in other words, is now actively being discarded by people raised within those democracies. The great success of the CIA books programme only points up the foolishness of these modern removals.
As I discovered while researching The CIA Book Club, the programme grew out of the propaganda drops of the 1950s, when hundreds of millions of leaflets were flown across the Iron Curtain by balloon. These drops were largely ineffective, as no one wanted to keep the leaflets. But when the CIA tried mailing books instead, to names culled from East European phone directories, they found people wanted to keep the books, and even sometimes wrote to ask for more. There was an opportunity here, and no one could see it more clearly than a Romanian American working on the book project in Manhattan: George Minden.
Mini-editions were produced which could be sealed inside tins of food and sent with humanitarian relief
Minden would go on to run the CIA books programme for three decades, latterly from a 14th floor office in a nondescript tower at 475 Park Avenue South. He and his team oversaw the infiltration of 10 million titles through the Iron Curtain over a period of almost four decades. In some cases the works they picked were nakedly anti-communist or anti-totalitarian – Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, for instance, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. But others titles covered art, medicine, linguistics and lifestyle. Copies of Marie Claire and Madame were sent along with Time magazine and the Manchester Guardian Weekly, and an early hit was the Whitney Museum’s Three Hundred Years of American Painting. This was to be an “offensive of free, honest thinking”, according to Minden, which would work because “truth is contagious”, and if they could only deliver it to the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Bloc, it was certain to have an effect.
Wittingly or not, many of the major publishing houses played a role in the operation by selling the CIA discounted copies and posting them on the agency’s behalf. But mail was just one delivery method. Another was “person-to-person” distribution, in which approved bookstores and libraries handed out free books to visitors from the Eastern Bloc on the understanding that they carry them back through the Iron Curtain. Enterprising CIA-linked distributors would approach travelling East European orchestras, sports teams, mountaineering clubs and dance troupes, offering them bundles of uncensored books to smuggle home. Later, literature would be carried into the East aboard yachts and by vans and trucks fitted with secret compartments. Mini-editions were produced which could be sealed inside tins of food and sent with humanitarian relief. Once the books reached their destination, they would circulate secretly among groups of likeminded individuals, drawing them together in the shared illicit act of reading.
No country took to the books with more enthusiasm than Poland, where a generation of dissidents were raised on uncensored literature that reached them from the West. They would reprint these works in the underground, as well as producing their own uncensored periodicals and newspapers, in many cases on presses paid for by the CIA and smuggled in. By the mid-1980s, the uncensored word had become so freely available to Poles that the regime could no longer maintain its grip on the narrative. It was in Poland that the first communist government fell, in 1989, leading to the collapse of the entire Soviet Bloc.
Numerous factors contributed to that collapse, but, as the leading Polish dissident Adam Michnik told me: “It was books that were victorious in the fight. We should build a monument to books.”
Today’s attempts at censorship differ in important ways from those of the USSR, but at heart they have the same aim: restricting knowledge and debate. The CIA helped resist these attempts then. We must resist them now.
