It’s often said that the best historical novels also function as present-day allegory. Cold Warriors, by British-born journalist, academic and Harvard lecturer Duncan White, is likewise a nonfiction historical study whose subject matter is as relevant as today’s headlines. The cold war has resumed, revamped for the digital age, with money replacing ideology. If the United States has colonised our subconscious, as Wim Wenders said, then the Kremlin responds by getting inside western brains, using social media as the trepan.
White’s book, a 700-plus page exploration of how the CIA, the British Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6) and the Kremlin weaponised literature from the 1930s until Glasnost, serves as a historical prologue to everything from Netflix’s The Great Hack to Peter Pomerantsev’s This is Not Propaganda. It may also grant some retrospective solace to the novelist or poet who despairs of literature’s declining role as a change agent in an age of memes replacing tomes. If nothing else, Cold Warriors testifies as to how seriously East and West once took books.
White writes: “The Office of War Information (OWI), established in 1942, made literature a central plank of its propaganda operations, as it worked with the US Army, the Psychological Warfare Branch, and the newly founded Office of Strategic Services intelligence agency (forerunner of the CIA) to develop new programmes. One OWI poster carried the slogan, ‘Books are Weapons in the War of Ideas’, and depicted a Nazi book-burning in the foreground... ‘Books do not have their impact upon the mass mind but on the minds of those who would mould the mass mind – upon leaders of thought and formulators of public opinion,’ read one OWI memo. ‘The impact of a book may last six months or several decades. Books are the most enduring propaganda of all.’”
Cold Warriors opens with an eye-grabbing factoid: in May 1955 the CIA orchestrated a balloon launch from West Germany into communist Poland. The payload: copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. But this war of words wasn’t just about agitprop: the battle lines were aesthetic as well as political. Stalin sanctioned all forms of literature except social realism, novels written for the people and the state. Modernism, from Joyce to Faulkner, with its cult of the individual and formal experimentation, was deemed decadent and bourgeois. As a consequence, avant-garde or left-leaning American authors often found themselves in the bizarre position of being sponsored by organisations covertly funded by the CIA, even as McCarthy and the House un-American activities committee (HUAC) were conducting communist witch hunts. (What White doesn’t mention are the Russian writers, from Zamyatin to the Strugatsky brothers, who dodged the bullets by using sci-fi allegory to critique the power bloc.)
Cold Warriors is a surprisingly accessible and compulsive read, not least because of its cast list: George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Boris Pasternak, Graham Greene, Anna Akhmatova, John le Carré, Mary McCarthy, Andrei Sinyavsky, Václav Havel, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gioconda Belli and many more. Some of these players were idealists and ideologues, others direct participants at the level of active espionage and even combat. White begins his narrative proper in the crucible of the Spanish Civil War, interweaving the stories of Orwell, Koestler and the poet Stephen Spender. All three were to greater or lesser degrees fall guys, idealists who volunteered to fight Franco’s Axis-backed fascists only to find themselves reluctant bedfellows with the Stalinists. Each of them ended up being – metaphorically – shot in the front by Nazis, stabbed in the back by hardline Communists, or used as unwitting stooges of the CIA. Their stories are properly cinematic, full of clandestine cross-border flights, double-crossings, arrests, internments and interrogations. All produced major works as a result of their experiences, in Orwell’s case numerous essays and journalistic dispatches, plus defining books such as Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and 1984.
White describes the latter as the most powerful weapon deployed in the cultural cold war. (Devotees will be intrigued to learn that the terrors of Room 101 have their origins in torture methods Orwell encountered under Franco’s regime.) It’s still an unnervingly prescient piece of fiction: 80 years before the White House and the Kremlin declared a unilateral war on truth, Orwell outlined the tenets of post-modern warfare. White: “It is not just the suppression of dissent that preoccupied Orwell when writing the novel. What he called the Sacred Principles of Ingsoc – ‘Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past’ – were Orwell’s way of satirising the way Stalinist totalitarianism attacked the very idea of objective reality.”
The cold war is a heavyweight subject, but Cold Warriors is a heavyweight book
Readers will also be reminded that writers were once front-line witnesses to history as it unfolded in real time. Cold Warriors has its fair share of boys’ own tales: Hemingway the two-fisted, hard-drinking war correspondent riding sidecar as the Allies retake Paris; Graham Greene embedded in Cuba as the missile crisis unfolds, writing the outline for the nuclear-age farce Our Man in Havana; the poet Gioconda Belli running guns for the Sandinistas; Václav Havel orchestrating a countercultural revolution in Prague, becoming head of state after 20 years of surveillance and imprisonment.
John le Carré might be the most fascinating of the lot. Born David Cornwell (he published under pseudonym in order to protect his work as an operative for the British security services), le Carré was on the ground in Berlin as the East German Army, local militias, the Red Army and the Stasi staged the shockingly swift (as in, overnight) construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, an event that inspired The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
By contrast, biographies of Isaac Babel, Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, all harassed, suppressed and crushed by the Soviet superstate, assume the shape of tragedy. Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago won the Nobel Prize in Literature but caused such a diplomatic incident it effectively ruined his life. That other Nobel winner, Solzhenitsyn, emerges as perhaps the most resilient survivor of the cold-war years, mainly because he played for the biggest stakes. Gulag Archipelago is described here as a literary atom bomb, exposing the brutality of the Soviet regime from Stalin to the detente years of the mid-1970s. It was only the Kremlin’s need to make some sort of rapprochement with the West, as well as the author’s international reputation, that ensured punishment by exile rather than imprisonment.
The cold war is a heavyweight subject, but Cold Warriors is a heavyweight book. History has rarely seemed as compelling, and as pertinent, as through the lens of White’s journey through this icy age.
Peter Murphy is the author of the novels John the Revelator and Shall We Gather at the River. His story The Downtown Queen appears in Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber)
