Suzanne's Mom's Blog

 Illustration: Eleanor Shakespeare/Bridgeman Images/The Guardian.

Of course, it couldn’t happen here, right? As we children always said during the time of the Cold War when someone opposed us, “It’s a free country!” And if we had applied that to reading material, we would have known we could read whatever we wanted. No need to smuggle anything in.

Well, what would that be like? In an edited extract from Charlie English’s book about Poland, The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War, the Guardian gives us an idea.

“The volume’s glossy dust jacket shows a 1970s computer room, where high priests of the information age, dressed in kipper ties and flares, tap instructions into the terminals of some ancient mainframe. The only words on the front read ‘Master Operating Station,’ ‘Subsidiary Operating Station’ and ‘Free Standing Display.’ Is any publication less appetizing than an out-of-date technical manual?

“Turn inside, however, and the book reveals a secret. It isn’t a computer manual at all, but a Polish language edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s famous anti-totalitarian novel, which was banned for decades by communist censors in the eastern bloc.

“This copy lives now in the library of Warsaw University, but for much of the cold war it belonged to the Polish writer and dissident Teresa Bogucka. It was Teresa’s father, the art critic Janusz Bogucki, who first brought it to Poland. In 1957, during a window of liberalization that opened after Stalin’s death, Janusz picked up the Orwell translation from a Polish bookshop in Paris, smuggled it back through the border and gave it to his daughter. Teresa was only 10 or 11 years old then, but she was a precocious reader, and recognized the ways in which communist Poland mirrored Orwell’s fictional dystopian state. …

“Years later, in 1976, when Bogucka joined the emerging Polish opposition movement, she decided to create a library of books that had bypassed the state censor, and donated her own small collection, including this Nineteen Eighty-Four. The SB security service, Poland’s KGB, kept continual watch on her, eavesdropping on her conversations, arresting her and searching her apartment, so she asked neighbors to store the forbidden books. Much of the time, though, they would be circulating among readers, since this would be a ‘Flying Library,’ which rarely touched the  ground.

“Bogucka’s system of covert lending ran through a network of coordinators, each of whom was responsible for their own tight group of readers. She sorted the books into categories – politics, economics, history, literature – and divided them into packages of 10, before allocating each coordinator a particular day to pick up their parcel, which they carried away in a rucksack. The coordinator would drop the books back the following month at a different address, before picking up a new set.

“The demand for Bogucka’s books was such that soon she needed more, and these could only come from the west. Activist friends passed word to London, where émigré publishers arranged shipments of 30 or 40 volumes at a time, smuggling them through the iron curtain aboard the sleeper trains that shuttled back and forth between Paris and Moscow, stopping in Poland along the way. By 1978, Teresa Bogucka’s Flying Library had a stock of 500 prohibited titles.

“How many people read her copy of Orwell’s book in those crucial cold war years? Hundreds, probably thousands. And this was just one of millions of titles that arrived illegally in Poland at that time. As well as via trains, books arrived by every possible conveyance: aboard yachts; in secret compartments built into vans and trucks; by balloon; in the post. Mini-editions were slipped into the sheet music of touring musicians, or packed into food tins or Tampax boxes. In one instance, a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was carried on a flight to Warsaw hidden in a baby’s nappy.

“What some in the east suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that the uncensored literature flooding the country wasn’t reaching Poles by chance. It was sent as part of a decades-long US intelligence operation, known in Washington as the ‘CIA book program,’ designed, in the words of the program’s leader, George Minden, to assault the eastern bloc with an ‘offensive of free, honest thinking.’ Minden believed that ‘truth is contagious,’ and if they could only deliver it to the oppressed peoples of the Soviet zone, it was certain to have an effect.

“From today’s vantage point, when disinformation threatens western liberal democracy as never before, and censorship and book bans are once again turning schools and libraries into ideological battlegrounds, the CIA literary programs appear almost quaint.

Although they had political goals, they must rank among the most highbrow of psychological warfare operations.

“Along with copies of the Manchester Guardian Weekly and the New York Review of Books, the CIA sent works by blacklisted authors such as Boris Pasternak, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky, anti-totalitarian writings by Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, literary fiction from Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut, writing advice from Virginia Woolf, the plays of Václav Havel and Bertolt Brecht, and the spy thrillers of John le Carré.

“Later, as well as smuggling books, the CIA would fund and ship presses and printing equipment into Poland, so that the banned titles could be reproduced in huge quantities by underground printers in situ. Few individuals were more central to these latter operations than the dissident publisher Mirosław Chojecki, known to the CIA by the cryptonym QRGUIDE.

“On a Tuesday evening in March 1980, the police came to arrest Chojecki for the 43rd time.”

Exciting stuff! Read more at the Guardian, here. No firewall.

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