One of the ironies of the Cold War was that the communist world, which repressed and jailed its writers, seemed to value literature much more highly than the West, where writers were free but neglected. In the Soviet Union the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were published in huge subsidised editions, even as living writers such as Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel were imprisoned and murdered. Both things could be taken as signs of communism’s belief in the power of the written word. After all, the October revolutionaries were writers themselves; before Lenin and Trotsky ruled Russia, they had spent years propagandising for Bolshevism in newspapers and books.
