There is something elegiac in Duncan White’s Cold Warriors, originally published in summer 2019 but released in paperback this past August. The book, a “group biography” of over a dozen literary figures who were involved on one side or other of the Cold War, tells a story that seems almost fantastic today—of a world in which government strategy involved novels, poetry, and literary criticism because literature was a cultural force in a way that it is not today.
White, a Brit whose doctorate at Oxford (undergrad Cambridge) was on Nabokov and who crossed the pond to add teaching at Harvard to his resumé while still keeping up with ye olde sceptered isle by reviewing books for the Telegraph, begins his tale of the literary side of the Cold War by recounting a CIA mission that took place between February and May 1955 in which ten foot balloons with a rather unique weapons payload were launched from West Germany into Poland. “At the height of the Cold war,” White intones, “the CIA made copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm rain down from the Communist sky.” White admits that it is an open question as to “how effective literature was in winning over hearts and minds,” but the “indisputable” fact is that “both superpowers” took it absolutely seriously and spent goodly amounts of treasure on getting the right (or left) books published and into the hands of the people while keeping the wrong books out of their hands.
In the latter task, the Soviet Union was much more eager and much more effective—and more willing to spend blood. The poet Anna Ahkhmatova, parts of whose story appears here, said that “not a single piece of literature” was ever allowed to leave the printers under Uncle Joe Stalin. Not surprising given the Party line expressed by the Union of Soviet Writers secretary Zhdanov, who thought that what made Soviet literature “the most advanced literature in the world” was that it did not and could not have “other interests besides the interests of the people, the interests of the state.” Akhmatova’s poetry, forbidden for many years, had the gall to treat topics such as sex and God, which might have interested the people but definitely not the state.
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