This is a collection of very detailed stories about different authors involvement in the political times of the Cold War, and is foremost a history book. I was mainly interested in Graham Greene, as he is one of my favorite authors. According to this book, he was very hedonistic and experimented with drugs and other diversions during his travels. The book also includes authors that were more seriously involved like Solzhenitsyn where their lives and freedom were at stake. ( )

A look at the Cold War through the eyes of writers and the books they wrote. American and the Soviets governments spend a lot of money to get there side heard during the Cold War and the varies purges in Russia during its early years. While one thinks of the Cold war as build ups in weapons, defense spending and the space race there was also a race to influence to influence readers about their side of the story. It is interesting to see how books played as role in this battle.. A battle for ideas played out in writing through articles, journals, magazines, books, and literary conferences on both side of the Atlantic. ( )

So last year an uncorrected proof of this book arrived from the publisher and I had no idea why. I didn't request it and when I called the number on the return label to find out which source had it sent (I request books from different sites) so I could post the review the guy I got said he was a warehouse and just shipped whatever book to whatever address he's told to. The book I had requested took a couple more months, which worked out in my favor because I got a full printed copy of that one. Anyway, none of my resources listed this up for offer so I shelved it to eventually get to, as the subject did look interesting. Then, back in August, I picked it up. Yes, August. It's a dense text and I kept setting it aside for other books.

White has put together a sweeping case for the pen being mightier than the sword (though we all know that the mutually assured destruction had more than a bit to do with the end of the so-called Cold War...) He admits that there is no real way to measure how effective literature was in affecting the readers of both sides, but as he lays out over his 700 pages the US and Soviet Union both took it seriously.

I was fascinated at all of the various spying some prominent and less prominent but no less influential novelists did. The NKVD really got it claws into quite a few. And the incredible resources applied to combating the two political paradigms is boggling. Long before Putin set his sights on using social media to bring about his desired outcome for an election, the Soviet Union was backing peace conferences in the West - lion and lamb metaphors are implied. And the US intelligence agencies funded their own anti-Soviet conferences and publications. The Soviets were quicker out of the box, though and the West had some catching up to do, slow to realize that they were already infiltrated.

McCarthy's rabid zeal for trapping communist sympathies was at least mostly public. The Soviet writers, and composers (Shostakovitch really comes to mind) and other artists, had it worse than a blacklist. When Isaac Babel was arrested by the NKVD in 1939, they sealed his study after removing everything written from it and then began pulling his books from libraries. "The man had been arrested; the writer was being erased." Nikolai Yezhov, perpetrator of so many horrors before becoming a victim of his own machine said, "We are launching an attack on the Enemy; let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better that ten innocent people should suffer than one spy get away. When you cop wood, chips fly." The number of flying chips is to this day numbing.

Some writers profiled here - that's rather an understatement; chronicled, illuminated, ... revealed/unveiled, is more accurate - are widely known of by the masses (example: Orwell). Some less so, and some quite a bit less so as they've fallen into the great melting pot of history. And White has captured a lot of history. A lot. This was a dismal time for many, and for the Soviets, tragic, caught up in Purges and more.

The text reads well, and at times like a thriller. As with most histories, an author can only know so much (if really at all) and must necessarily fill in. Skilled historians do so with insight, non-historian hacks like Martin Dugard and his co-"writer" make up stuff. White is skilled.

One small note I flagged I'll shared here. White quoted FDR:

Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know books are weapons.

So... inspiration for Bradbury? ( )

Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War by Duncan White is popular history at its best. Historians or the average reader who stayed on top of the political situation for the past fifty years or so may be impatient with White's careful explanations (perestroika and glasnost defined, for example), but for those of us who were not paying attention at the time, this book sweeps us along with clarity. Even experts may find much to enjoy because White gets at his subject through a focus on the writers on both sides of the conflict.
Beginning with the Spanish Civil War, journalists and writers of fiction were not merely observers and reporters but often spies too. We follow Orwell and Koestler, Stephen Spender and Hemingway, Graham Greene and Mary McCarthy with much the same eagerness that a good spy novel generates. We also follow Isaac Babel and Andrei Sinyavsky and Anna Akhmatova in the earlier years, and then branch out to see McCarthy in North Vietnam and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia. Literature mattered. These authors used their craft to persuade and were also used by their governments. White closes his book by considering changes in culture that have weakened literature as a weapon in our current cold war but not destroyed the power of writers who live and write truth.
Thanks to Early Reviewers for my galley copy of this good book. I'll probably buy a copy eventually so that I can have it with an index. ( )

Strategic Long-Term Propaganda
by Randy Boyagoda
First Things
June 2020

In the opening lines of Cold Warriors, Duncan White notes that “between February and May 1955, a group covertly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency launched a secret weapon into Communist territory”: balloons carrying copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. This was perhaps the most prominent title among “tens of millions of books, leaflets, pamphlets, posters” that were distributed by hundreds of thousands of weather balloons. “In response,” White ­continues, “the authorities in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland warned its citizens that possession of this material was illegal and even sought to shoot down the balloons with fighter planes and ­antiaircraft guns.”

Nearly seven hundred pages later, White states the obvious:

Literature is no longer conceived of as a weapon to be deployed in cultural warfare: it is hard to imagine the publication of a novel precipitating a geopolitical crisis in the manner of Dr. Zhivago or The Gulag Archipelago. . . . The specific circumstances of the Cold War will never be repeated, and the idea of literature being deployed by governments on a vast scale is no longer credible.

Of course, governments still worry about writers and writing—China regularly restricts the travel of dissident authors; it goes after booksellers who sell books that criticize the central government; and it bullies foreign embassies, usually Scandinavian, that raise concerns. PEN International regularly documents the situation of imprisoned, suppressed, and disappeared writers living under repressive regimes around the world.

But in the main, White is correct. It is impossible to imagine governments turning to writers, and writing, to help in a conflict with other nations, let alone devising a contemporary version of literary airlifts by weather balloon. And then there’s the suspicion of patriotism and the military that is now inherent to literary culture. (John Updike spent decades living down the qualified support he once expressed for the Vietnam War.) This reciprocal and mutually affirming suspicion is taken for granted today, but the ­situation was otherwise throughout the Cold War. Indeed, some of the most interesting passages in White’s book describe the public and clandestine activities of (primarily) the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union to deploy literature in the service of their respective national interests, and the willingness of writers to be so deployed.

Take Richard Wright, who was under FBI surveillance for his communist sympathies in the 1950s, even as the CIA promoted him and his work internationally as evidence of how dissenting writers were free to express themselves under American democracy. Then there’s the only-in-America success story of Howard Fast. After being imprisoned for refusing to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early 1950s, the blacklisted author self-published a best-selling critique of McCarthyism, ­Spartacus. A film adaptation starring Kirk Douglas expressed the writer’s anti-conformist views while enjoying massive commercial success. Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Boris Pasternak completed the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago and had it smuggled out of the country. The KGB tried to prevent its publication by an Italian publisher, which initially agreed out of shared communist sympathies only to reverse course after the Soviet-supported Hungarian government brutally suppressed the 1956 popular uprising.
This is the first of your three free articles for the month.

Pasternak emerges as one of the book’s most impressive, if tragic, figures. He wrote his novel knowing it would anger Soviet authorities, but he did not anticipate how Western powers would wield it against his country. The CIA, Dutch intelligence, and the Vatican conspired to provide Russian-language editions of the novel to Russians visiting the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. The CIA regarded it and similar titles as “strategic (long-range) propaganda.” The irony, of course, is that Doctor Zhivago appealed precisely because it wasn’t written as propaganda. As White observes, “The lead character, Zhivago, a doctor and a poet, refuses to engage with politics, and it was this, [the CIA] argued, that was ‘fundamental’” to its meaning. The CIA, whose earliest analysts included people with serious literary training and interests, saw Zhivago as a challenge to the idea that ­politics is the first and last context for ­meaningful ­experience. In this sense, they believed, the book was efficaciously opposed to the first principles of Marxist and Stalinist thought and practice.

As his book gained acclaim in the West, Pasternak was denounced at home by fellow writers and intellectuals in state-controlled newspapers and literary publications. He was also closely watched by the KGB. After he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1958, he was expelled from the national writers’ union, lost his pension, and was attacked by the state press “for his ‘shameful, ­unpatriotic attitude.’” He rejected the prize, abjured Western acclaim, and became suicidal. Pasternak died a broken man, if not without supporters. White describes the crowds who defied the authorities to attend his funeral and silently recite, in unison, some of his lines.

While Pasternak’s life and work afford an especially tragic example of a writer caught up in Cold War struggles, the efforts of writers such as Ernest ­Hemingway, Graham Greene, and David Cornwell (the future John le Carré)—all of whom sought out some form of work in the military or intelligence—suggest a version of heroism particular to the West’s Cold War culture. They worked not only in support of various national interests but in pursuit of their own personal ends, at once romantic and cynical. Whatever their politics, they pursued them in a way that affirmed individualism and imperfection over and against collectivism and conformism.

In this context, Mary McCarthy comes off more poorly than most of the other writers chronicled in this account. With customary cockiness, she claimed that novelists could make a special contribution to the broader effort of understanding the Vietnam War amid its conflicting imperatives and narratives: “What we can do, perhaps better than the next man, is smell a rat.” Yet even as ­McCarthy questioned the accounts she was given by the U.S. and U.S.-supported government officials in Saigon, she credulously swallowed the self-­presentation of the North Vietnamese. In addition to suffering from poor sales of pamphlet versions of her writing about the situation in Vietnam, McCarthy was criticized by the likes of Diana Trilling, in the New York Review of Books, for committing the mortal sin of any serious and self-respecting intellectual: ordering one’s capacities for genuinely liberal and open inquiry and analysis to the affirmation of static ideological ­purposes.

White tends to write in an excited, even breathless, manner. This becomes wearisome, but it’s understandable. He’s not alone in admiring a time when writers were willing and able, and also recognized and reckoned with as serious contributors to national life and geopolitical questions of consequence that weren’t disproportionately about themselves. The latter is very much the case these days, at least in the Anglophone West. Writers almost always show up in public consciousness either for winning prizes or because of Twitter fights over the right relationship of a given writer’s identity and chosen subject matter. Literary imaginations are capable of inspiring greater acts of heroism and villainy than such vain mirror work.

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The Cold War of Words
By David Pryce-Jones
National Review
August 22, 2019

Known as the Cold War, the clash of interest between the United States and the Soviet Union played out on several fronts, and culture was one of them. On both sides, the leadership had to do what it could to persuade the public that its values were superior, in the end worth fighting for. Intellectuals therefore came into their own because they were identifiable supporters of the political and social values under which they were living, or, perhaps more crucially, because they were critics. Survival might be a matter for the military; freedom was at stake for everybody.

Duncan White, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard, sketches the involvement in the Cold War of a score or so of intellectuals, most of them American or British, with select Russians thrown in. Each merits a separate chapter, mostly biographical. White’s chosen few had only a moral sense of right and wrong in support of their anti-Communism. The CIA and British intelligence services were slow to become institutions fit for the Cold War. This book’s opening page describes the moment when the best that American intelligence agents could do was to fly 500 illicit books into Poland by attaching them to inflated ten-foot balloons. White makes a case that the long war of words over Communism was always a matter of personality, and he locates its origins in the Spanish Civil War. In a famous pamphlet, 127 leading authors took the side of the Left while only six came out for the Right. The British and French official policy of bemused neutrality in the civil war left the field open for Stalin and Hitler to intervene. The clash of interests appeared simple. A Communist now became an anti-fascist. All good men are anti-fascist, and therefore objectively, as the Party would say, all good men are Communists. Hemingway’s political engagement and his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls illustrate this trite syllogism.

Real anti-fascist passion motivated George Orwell. His comrades in the trenches called themselves anarchists. He was lucky to survive a bullet through the neck and luckier still to escape from Stalinist Communists under orders to murder other leftists, whether anarchists, Trotskyists, or whatever. Political reality was catching up with someone determined to tell the truth and master of a clear style all his own. The various articles he wrote about his experience in Spain, and his book Homage to Catalonia, have been reprinted many times, but it still comes as a shock to remember that publishers rejected all of them for fear of offending the Left. Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, was one of these fainthearts, and in just a few sentences about him Orwell shows what scorn can do. Animal Farm and 1984 had the power to turn the image of Stalin from Uncle Joe to Big Brother. Czeslaw Milosz, himself at one time close enough to the Polish Communist Party to consider joining it, describes in The Captive Mind (1953) the amazement of his fellow Poles that Orwell could write so exactly about Communism when he had never lived under it. No British writer since Shakespeare has had such influence on public opinion, and White does him justice.

The Soviet Union was a police state, unmatched when it came to the black arts. A worldwide network loosely referred to as the Comintern consisted of activists at home and secret agents abroad. Something like a thousand media outlets and front organizations spread the Party line in many languages and many countries. Propaganda, deception, and information were indistinguishable. The United States and every country in Western Europe had its Communist party, whose leaders ensured obedience to Moscow. The course of events in the real world obliged Howard Fast and Richard Wright, the best-known American Communist writers, to understand that they had been peddling illusion and lies. Soviet writers had to deal with illusion and lies on a daily basis in the certainty that disobedience was likely to lead to a death sentence. White tells the tragic stories of Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, the poet Anna Akhmatova, and Andrei Sinyavsky. No less tragic, Alexander Fadeyev, head of the writers’ union and therefore official enforcer of obedient literature, could not live with the harm he had done and shot himself. Except for the religious dimension, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a 20th-century Voltaire. White sees him as the bravest of the brave, with the unusual gift of cunning on top of it.

Arthur Koestler worked for the Comintern and knew the Party from the inside. When he perceived how the Party preferred causes to people, he broke with it. Escaping to Britain in the chaos of 1940, he nevertheless had with him the manuscript of Darkness at Noon. Although in the form of fiction, this exposition of the Party served as Koestler’s anti-Communist credentials. The watching world had been stupefied by trials in Moscow when foremost Communists pleaded guilty to crimes of treason they could not possibly have committed. For whatever reason, Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, had denied that the trials had been rigged. Koestler’s explanation was that the Party’s abusive appeal to loyalty could pressure anyone to confess to anything. The Communist press bracketed him with Orwell, often openly calling for their assassination.

In order to have a forum in which to debate with the Soviets forcefully and regularly, Koestler helped to launch two projects, the Congress of Cultural Freedom and the monthly magazine Encounter. Unanimously leftists of one stripe or another, the contributors to the rival magazine Partisan Review sounded as though they were having a private conversation. Encounter’s editor, Melvin Lasky, was as formidable a character as Koestler, and he obtained financial backing from the CIA. When this became public knowledge, Stephen Spender, Lasky’s deputy and more a ninny than a poet, resigned. What did it matter where the money came from when Encounter was arguably the best magazine ever published in the English language, with an emphasis more on poetry and fiction than on politics? A number of critics made it an issue that the magazine depended on official but undeclared backing, but is that enough to discredit social democracy? White concludes the relevant chapter harshly, “Koestler fought the Cold War too hard.” Room should have been found in these 700 pages to mention the Sovietologists Walter Laqueur and Leo Labedz, front-line soldiers in the Cold War. For many years they edited Survey, the most authoritative specialist journal about the Soviet Union, presumably paid for by British intelligence. Both of them had encyclopedic memories that allowed them to have the last word.

In the course of the Cold War, anti-Communism was liable to dissolve into anti-anti-Communism. Put another way, there were intellectuals who accepted that Communism was an evil but didn’t like those who said so nor the way they said it. Graham Greene was one such. By nature an outsider, he sought to give offense, which fitted him, or perhaps unfitted him, for the Cold War. No writer outside the Communist Party has so continuously maligned the West and justified the Soviet Union. In a letter to the London Times in September 1967, he summed up his feelings. “If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States, I would certainly choose the Soviet Union.” America for him is “just the drugstore and the Coca-Cola, the hamburger, the sinless empty graceless chromium world.” Two of White’s chapters are devoted to Greene and generously overlook or underplay Greene’s pride in “my friend Fidel Castro,” his contribution to the Sandinistas in the hope his money would buy bullets, his defense of Kim Philby, the spy who betrayed Britain for Stalin’s Soviet Union, and much else of the sort. A similarly indulgent chapter sets up John le Carré, another outsider by nature, as heir to Greeneland, morbidly downbeat about the workings of democracy, capitalism, pharmaceutical companies, or whatever. As though they were like for like, le Carré repeatedly holds up the morality and efficacy of Soviet agents against their British counterparts.

“I confess that when I went to Vietnam early last February I was looking for material damaging to the American interest and I found it” is the revealing first sentence of Mary McCarthy’s Vietnam (1967). Anti-Communism, she was writing to her friend Hannah Arendt, was more of a danger than Communism. President Nixon, she feared, was setting up a police state. If you wanted law and order and proper police protection, you would defect behind the Iron Curtain. On whose side was this dubious heroine of the Cold War? She was representative of a type that saw nothing wrong (and a great deal right) in ridiculing the social system that provided her with indispensable royalties.

Cold Warriors is a big and brash book at the heart of which is the surprise that all in all, even in these godforsaken times, the pen managed to remain mightier than the sword.

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Reviewed by: Francis P. Sempa
New York Journal of Books

“[T]he best part of White’s book [is] the stories of writers such as Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Havel, and others who courageously wrote and spoke the truth to power behind the iron curtain.”

The Cold War was waged on many fronts: geopolitical, military, ideological, religious, and literary. Duncan White, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard who reviews books for the Daily Telegraph, has authored a new book on what he calls the literary Cold War.

White’s literary history is told mainly through the lives and works of George Orwell (real name Eric Blair), Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Isaac Babel, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Howard Fast, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Richard Wright, John Le Carre (real name, David Cornwell), Andrei Sinyavsky, Gioconda Belli, and Vaclav Havel. Other writers make cameo appearances.

The book begins with Orwell, Koestler, and Spender idealistically fighting on, or rooting for, the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, but soon becoming disillusioned by Soviet-communist control of the movement. This disillusionment led Orwell to write Homage to Catalonia, and Koestler to write Spanish Testament and later Darkness at Noon. These books were meant to educate their fellow leftists on the realities of communism in practice.

White notes that Orwell was among the first to review Darkness at Noon. He used the review, White explains, “to rage against the ‘eagerness of Western intellectuals’ who had justified [Stalin’s show] trials and that the ‘simultaneous cases in Spain’ had been ‘sedulously covered up or lied about in the Left-wing press.’”

Orwell called Koestler’s novel a “masterpiece,” which showed him, according to White, “that fiction, rather than journalism or memoir, however scrupulous, was the most effective way to communicate the essence of totalitarianism.”

Stalin’s purges and show trials in the 1930s, which included imprisoning or executing “anti-Soviet” writers like Isaac Babel, and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, divided the literary Left in the Western world. Some joined the non-communist Left and wrote for journals such as Partisan Review. Others maintained their loyalty to Stalin and communism and felt vindicated when the United States and Soviet Union became allies in the Second World War.

The Cold War actually began before the Second World War ended. Soviet spies and agents of influence infiltrated the governments of Western powers, including the U.S. and Britain, in the 1930s and 1940s. White details the damage caused by the Cambridge Five Soviet agents, and spends an inordinate amount of print humanizing the traitorous Kim Philby.

White credits George Orwell with anticipating the geopolitics of the early Cold War in his novel 1984. But it was James Burnham, not Orwell, who first envisioned a post-World War II world dominated by a clash of “super-states” in The Managerial Revolution (1941). White relegates to a footnote the fact that Orwell borrowed this idea from Burnham.

It was also James Burnham who in the spring of 1944 wrote a classified analysis for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that warned about Soviet intentions to dominate the postwar world. White notes Burnham’s ties to the OSS and the postwar CIA, as well as his role in founding the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). But White describes Burnham as “fanatical in his anti-Communism and a relentless intriguer.”

White’s treatment of Burnham is symptomatic of his overall treatment of the anti-communist Right. Entirely missing from his history of the literary Cold War are Isaac Don Levine, Bertram Wolfe, Eugene Lyons, Edmund Walsh, Whittaker Chambers, Max Eastman, William Henry Chamberlain, Ralph de Toledano, Norman Podhoretz, Brian Crozier, William F. Buckley, Jr., and many others.

Also unmentioned by White is Burnham’s bi-weekly column on the Cold War that appeared in National Review from 1955 to 1978. Indeed, National Review, which was the leading journal of the anti-Communist Right in the United States, doesn’t even make the book’s index.

White’s literary Cold War was waged, it seems, only by those intellectuals on the anti-communist Left who wrote for Partisan Review, Encounter, and similar journals. Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary, which played a crucial role in the literary Cold War, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, is also missing from the book’s index.

In this sense, White’s selection of writers is revealing. By including Howard Fast, Richard Wright, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, John Le Carre, and Gioconda Belli, White seeks to be even-handed in his treatment of writers who opposed communism and those who were often critical of the United States and the West. There are murmurs of moral equivalency here that are unwarranted. The sufferings of literary dissidents under communism bear no comparison to writers who dissented from U.S. or Western policies during the Cold War.

White seems to believe that writers who willingly served the interests of the United States during the Cold War were no different from writers who willingly served the interests of the Soviet state. “The story of the literary Cold War,” he writes, “is one of complicity, in which writers were manipulated and coopted, often without their knowledge or consent. It is a story of novels, poems, and plays being weaponized by the state as propaganda.”

White is critical of the CIA’s secret funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the journals funded by the CCF such as Encounter. He provides very little evidence, however, that the CIA determined the content of Encounter and other journals it funded. He provides no evidence that the writers for such journals wrote what they did because funding came from the CIA (indeed, most were unaware of that fact).

White is equally critical of U.S. and CIA involvement in Southeast Asia and their support for right-wing, authoritarian dictatorships who opposed communist influence in key regions of the world, though he is careful to point out instances where his literary warriors swooned over the likes of Castro, Daniel Ortega, the North Vietnamese communists, and other unsavory types.

The larger point, however, is that the CIA was an important, if not always effective, weapon in the West’s arsenal to wage and win the Cold War. And the West’s victory in the Cold War was a positive good for the world, especially for those people who lived under communist rule.

That brings us to the best part of White’s book—the stories of writers such as Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Havel, and others who courageously wrote and spoke the truth to power behind the iron curtain. The dissident movement within the Soviet empire clearly played an important role in ending communist rule.

It was Solzhenitsyn, more than any other single writer, who plunged the stake into the heart of the Soviet system with The Gulag Archipelago. This book showed unmistakably, writes White, that “the secret police, arbitrary imprisonment and execution, and systematic forced labor traced their origins to the immediate aftermath of the [Bolshevik] revolution, that mass incarceration and slave labor were baked into Soviet Communism.”

White concludes the book describing the mostly peaceful revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe and within the Soviet Union itself that ended the Cold War. Unsurprisingly, he gives too much credit to Gorbachev and not enough credit to Reagan, and no credit at all to Pope John Paul II who himself was a writer and intellectual of considerable merit. Indeed, it is arguable that John Paul II’s spoken and written words did more to bring down the iron curtain than any writer discussed by White.