Why did the Soviet Union collapse? The reasons are complex and manifold, and it is not clear which, if any, may have been more decisive than others. The answers fall into two broad categories, the “realist” and the “ideational.” The former maintains that the Soviet Union, unable to maintain parity with the US and working within a centralized economic structure, imploded economically, or that Gorbachev’s attempted reforms guided by Glasnost (“openness”) and Perestroika (restructuring) produced centrifugal political instability in various Warsaw Pact nations, especially Poland.
Proponents of the latter category, the ideational, argue that throughout the Soviet Bloc, to varying degrees, nationalist sentiments were never extinguished and began to revive. The illegitimacy of the ideas that rationalized Soviet repression became increasingly apparent, and religious sentiment also grew, especially in Poland, where communist repression made the country not less, but more fiercely Roman Catholic. In June of 1979, Pope John Paul II undertook a nine-day visit to his native Poland, and approximately 11 million of the population of 36 million greeted him, celebrated Mass, and absorbed his homilies. One year later, Solidarity, the non-communist Polish labor union, was born.
There is yet another ideational phenomenon, “wholly unnoticed in the West during the Cold War,” which may have played a decisive role. This was the CIA-sponsored book program in which the US coordinated the distribution of books to key individuals, libraries, research institutes, cultural organizations, and universities and schools, in six Warsaw Pact countries (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and late in the program, the Soviet Union) from mid-1956 through 1991. That material, over time, found its way to much of the general public. The program, according to one CIA officer, was “perhaps the most successful covert action program, regardless of [any] standard of measure.” Or, as a program participant put it, the book program was “ideological, political, cultural, and psychological warfare all wrapped up in one.” According to one testimony, “those books in the hands of the intellectual elites of Central and Eastern Europe might rival or even exceed Radio Free Europe in influencing the course of history.”
This program is the subject of two books, one published in 2013 and the other in 2025, that reveal the hidden story of the secret book distribution program to Eastern Europe during the Cold War. At its height between 1957 and 1970, the book program was one of the least known but, arguably, most effective methods of penetrating the Iron Curtain. This is the subject of Charlie English’s The CIA Book Club, released earlier this year, which offers a focused narrative of the dynamics of the program, principally in Poland, the most crucial of the five countries that served as targets for the program. This work adds to a short-but-worthy list of books on this subject, most important among them Alfred Reisch’s 2013 Hot Books in the Cold War. As someone intimately involved in the program in Hungary for fifteen years, Reisch offers the more comprehensive study, but English, a former correspondent for the London-based Guardian, knows how to tell a story.
The Program and Material
Though there are leading personalities, Reisch explains, “To sum up the story of the origins of the Cold War covert book project, the idea came to a lot of people at the same time, with the CIA in on the project from the beginning.” It is estimated that the program reached at least ten million people behind the Iron Curtain as it extended beyond targeted elites to the general population. English reports that by 1962, the program involved coordination with “500 organizations” that were sending books on the CIA’s behalf. They included “Doubleday, Barnes & Noble, the Oxford English Dictionary, Encyclopedia Britannica, Allen and Unwin, Faber and Faber, MacMillan and Hachette—among hundreds more. Somehow, and against all odds, even into the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when the CIA came under unfavorable scrutiny, the book program remained a secret.
The material fell into several categories. The first consisted of explicit political propaganda, which, preceding the book program, had been delivered by hot air balloons that indiscriminately littered the Soviet Bloc countries where tracts were dropped. The balloon program was suspended in 1957 at the behest of the West German government, which objected, not to the message, but to the means of delivery. The material continued to be distributed by other methods for a time, but the shape of the program eventually shifted as many people came to believe that stoking popular uprisings was less prudent than trying to achieve change gradually by a change in the hearts and minds of the citizenry and the elite leadership.
Books were a means of “breaking down the ideological and cultural Iron Curtain … opening wide a window on the culture and achievements of the free Western world.”
The latter, it was hoped, might lead to a gradual internal reform. Revolution, it was feared, would produce political instability; or, public protests and popular agitation might provoke greater repression, as happened in Poland in 1981, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Hungary in 1956. In this later phase, the program distributed periodicals, especially émigré publications like the Polish Kultura, published in Paris, and the Czech Svědectví; also, weeklies: principally News from Czechoslovakia, News from Hungary, and News from Poland. Some of these periodicals contained literary and scientific articles, easing the suspicion of censors. In at least one instance, select clippings from Kultura were sent to 500 strategically chosen individuals, with the expectation that some would be shared, or better yet, disseminated. Sent as well were “the original texts of protests against Soviet hegemony raised in Yugoslavia and East Germany, and unpurged history books and ethnic literature otherwise not available,” as well as critiques by intellectual defectors of the Communist system.
A second category had to do with explicitly anti-totalitarian political fiction, the most prominent of which was George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, and Alexandre Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Although not as explicitly political, Dr. Zhivago was popular; a copy was even requested by a member of the Sejm (Polish Parliament).
The third category was a potpourri of fiction and non-fiction, ranging from manuals on engineering, art history, medical references, literature, philosophy, architecture, music, and film and theater guides. Little of this is explicitly political but was chosen to rouse the curiosity and expand the imagination of readers—and, once again, to lull the censors into complacency. Over half of the books smuggled through the Iron Curtain fall into this category. Emphasis was put on the “popularization of unfamiliar aspects of Western cultural achievements and of general works on the history of Western ideas, philosophy, and traditions. All of this was intended to remedy the “lack of humanistic thinking” and to foster in the target countries “a feeling of communion in this world” and “integration into the intellectual and spiritual life of our age.”
It is this latter category that might be the most fascinating for contemporary advocates of the liberal arts. These books included Albert Camus’ The Rebel, Alexander Eliott’s Three Hundred Years of American Painting, the Anthology of English and American Poetry, and mysteries by Agatha Christie. Other authors were William Faulkner, Hannah Arendt, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka, Gunnar Myrdal, Reinhold Niebuhr, Jean-Paul Sartre, and José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses. More fiction came from authors Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut, as well as the plays of Václav Havel. John le Carré’s spy thrillers were popular. Even writing advice from Virginia Woolf made it from West to East.
Dominos Falling
By organizing his book around the activity in Poland, English provides the best description of the intricate mechanics of how the books were smuggled into the communist-led countries. At times, his book reads like a spy thriller. The stakes were high as those involved risked lengthy sentences in communist-run jails. Meeting locations rotated, conversations were packed with ever-changing code words, surveillance was constant, and anyone could be an informant. It was high-stakes intrigue. Over the years of the program, Poland received far more books than any other country, and more books were requested by the Polish elite and other citizens. Indeed, one of the most important features of the program was correspondence and material shipments from the West to the East. Those behind the Iron Curtain were able to communicate with their benefactors, requesting certain books, and expressing their thanks for the program’s patronage.
English asserts, “The impact of this literary tide was huge. Poland was the most crucial of Eastern Bloc nations: when communism collapsed in 1989, this was the first domino to fall, and it was literature that won the war here.” English quotes Polish dissident Adam Michnik, who asserted,
I am convinced it was books that were victorious in the fight. A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity. A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad. (English, p. 343)
Clearly, the program had a deep impact on many people. How much credit, though, should the program get for the fall of communism generally? In his lengthy and careful introduction to the Reisch book, Professor Mark Kramer, current director of the Cold War Institute at Harvard University, explains that proving the success of the book program requires addressing multiple and complicated variables. That said, the evidence that Reisch presents, and the careful narrative that English reconstructs, are convincing, and their conclusions are persuasive. For example, Reisch argues that books were a means of “breaking down the ideological and cultural Iron Curtain … opening wide a window on the culture and achievements of the free Western world.”
The program’s manager, George Minden, explains,
All book distribution is politically significant because all books—political and literary—accomplish the political task of making the ideological isolation of Eastern Europe difficult and thus frustrate one of the communists’ main political objectives. For the communists, too, all Western books, whether political or non-political, are politically significant and feared as such. (Reisch, p. 522)
A beneficiary of the program later wrote,
Books gave us the tools to understand this world. … We read poetry and literature. It showed us that there are likeminded people who … we can empathize with, who admire beauty, who admire virtue. (English, p. 281)
All of this speaks importantly to the current state of the liberal arts. First, it affirms the power of a liberal arts education, both formal instruction in youth and the cultivated habit of reading and participation in artistic and musical culture. It is evident that among the many benefits of the liberal arts is a quest for freedom and a love of liberty.
Secondly, it illuminates a red flashing light in response to the denigration of a Western liberal arts education—by those in the West. There exist at least two fronts in the war on this side of the Atlantic: one is ideological as detractors promote cultural relativism, discounting “Western-centric” learning. Rap is as good as Tchaikovsky. “Who am I to judge?” Secondly, sweeping through education today is a complaint—not so much from students as from their educators—that symphonies and novels are just too long and difficult for today’s students.
In fairness, parents may be as guilty as educators when they complain that reading Dostoevsky is just too tough—and besides, what’s the use? Reisch and English put the lie to the “too difficult” complaint: English, for example, explains in excruciating detail the danger and convoluted logistics in smuggling and reprinting material in Poland on typewriters, printing presses, offset presses, and copy machines. Sometimes, the only edition of Solzhenitsyn’s works available to Polish readers was microscopic copies of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago clandestinely nestled in a baby’s diapers.
At the very least, these two books ensure that the book distribution program will now be included in the history of the Cold War as it should.