Duncan White’s recent study Cold Warriors revisits the great ideological battles of the middle decades of the twentieth century. During this time, Soviet Communism initially made converts and cultural inroads in the West, only to be gradually pushed back in the years following the Second World War. While Frances Stonor Saunders’s Who Paid the Piper? (1998) covers much the same history, Cold Warriors is a valuable update, particularly now that the Soviet turn in Russian history seems to have run its course. It makes for a readable and often fascinating account of how some writers were, as White says, “manipulated and co-opted, often without their knowledge or consent”, and of “novels, poems and plays being weaponised by the state as propaganda” ‑ Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, for instance. A long story, but told here with humour and an appropriate amount of irreverence ‑ the often Pythonesque antics of the CIA over Cuba, say, which are beyond satire.
