The Power of the Word

 

A few years ago, I wrote a column about Lara Prescott’s book, The Secrets We Kept, a novel about CIA’s successful efforts in the late 1950’s to bootleg Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which Novy Mir had refused to publish.  CIA arranged for the first Russian-language edition, and snuck back it into the USSR, hoping to embarrass the Kremlin.  They got more than they hoped for when Pasternak won the Nobel Prize but was discouraged (to put it mildly) from accepting.  For the Soviet Union, it was a public-relations disaster, the engines of terror fearful of a poet.  The story is fiction, but the context, the history, is genuine.  Zhivago opened a crack in the monolith.

Here’s another one.  An account of a CIA covert program with the codename HELPFUL, which is about the projection of soft power.  The author is Charlie English, and the story he tells is called The CIA Book Club.  The idea behind the operation is that reading unregimented literature, books that question the orthodoxy or the received wisdom, can unlock the curious mind.  Not just Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, but Kurt Vonnegut, and Agatha Christie, and Albert Camus.

The focus is Poland in the 1980’s, and interestingly, the book-smuggling effort parallels the rise of Solidarity.  CIA was not directly involved with Solidarity – they were careful to maintain deniability – but they channeled money to the movement, through third parties.  The book thing, though, was more indirect.  It was an opposition of ideas, or of culture, in a generic, popular sense: not Plato’s Republic so much as current issues of Cosmopolitan.  There was, yes, an element of cultural imperialism, Charlie English admits, but the impulse was to show a life outside the Iron Curtain, to show that there was an opportunity for that life, beyond Soviet domination.

It’s a significant distinction.  Not that the lure of a life in Peoria is a better shopping experience than you’d find in Warsaw, an unlimited inventory of Air Jordans, but that Warsaw could aspire to a larger life.  That through reading, through an act of imagination, the act of experiencing a forbidden reality, you could internalize it, you could breathe that intoxicating air.  These people didn’t want to defect, or escape, from Eastern Europe, they wanted to reinvent a community of hope.

Entertaining that future of infinite possibilities seems like a peculiarly American sensibility, Frederick Jackson Turner’s myth of the frontier, and perhaps the New World re-exported it to the Old, but it’s reductive – and condescending - to think in exceptionalist terms.  The eager readers of those books, in Poland and Moldova and Ukraine, didn’t need to be persuaded.  What they were looking for was the light at the end of the tunnel, and the CIA book smugglers opened a road map.

It’s a fascinating window on what appears to be a more innocent age, too.  I’ve always been struck by the irony, that the Soviet Union would ban books, and send writers to mental hospitals, or the Gulag, and in the U.S., we’d let market forces do the work.  Behind the Iron Curtain, you took a Pasternak or a Milovan Djilas seriously; here, you’d simply let them die of neglect. 

It speaks to the power of the written word, even in this degraded information environment, that we can look back at this footnote to the Cold War, and realize wistfully that books lit the match.  They were refuge, and rescue, and the last, best hope of the future.