Book Review
A literary work is often a better polemic than an editorial or a political speech. I refer to literature in its broadest sense: novels, short stories, poems, and theater. There are reductionist interpretations that argue all literature is political. Regardless, political meaning is often derived despite a writer’s stated intentions. Once created and released, a literary work may take on meanings completely at odds with what the artist envisioned. Likewise, some works of literature are particularly adept at reflecting the undercurrents of an era, with the most enduring works becoming iconic reflections of the societies they sprang from. Twentieth-century literature, in particular, often mirrors the impact of that century’s totalizing conflicts, whether in modernist novels capturing the calamity of the First World War or the Nazi Party’s censorship and blacklisting of authors. Inevitably, art was drawn into the ideological orbit of the Cold War’s bipolar world, a contest between systems locked in mutually assured destruction. As Kenneth Osgood noted in Total Cold War, during the Cold War “non-military modes of combat, particularly ideological and symbolic ones” became critically important to the United States and USSR. Duncan White builds on Osgood’s idea in Cold Warriors: Writers Who Wage the Literary Battles of the Cold War. It follows the direct competition in the realm of literature between the superpowers—underscoring its power as a refined tool for propaganda.
Cold Warriors begins with a compelling scene from 1955: a CIA operation to float balloons carrying copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm into communist Poland. Despite the absurdity of this vignette, it perfectly demonstrates the importance placed on the written word. It also sets the context: during the Cold War, both superpowers poured vast resources into the production and dissemination of ideologically charged literature and, at the same time, fought to control books and publications that ran counter to their prevailing ideologies (especially in the Eastern Bloc). What distinguishes Cold Warriors is White’s focus on how individual authors navigated—and were sometimes crushed by—this environment. Rather than attempting a comprehensive political history, the book adopts what White calls a “group biography” of Cold War writers. Each chapter is devoted to a writer and his or her Cold War experience. I believe it might be more fitting to characterize White’s approach as a group of microhistories of literary figures immersed in the Cold War, many of whom intersect and interact. We see how writers from both blocs responded to and negotiated shifting ideological demands. In many ways, this approach helps illuminate the Cold War’s cultural contours better than an exclusively top-down narrative of political events.
The contest over literature was different from general propaganda in that it aimed at influencing elite opinion. As White observes, “both superpowers took this effort seriously,” using both overt and covert measures to shape elite opinion and, by extension, broader cultural currents. The Soviets and the Americans each recognized that, unlike wars fought in the past, this was a conflict of ideas. The ideological contest unfolded on multiple fronts, with each side competing to win favor in the public consciousness around the world. Literature was a battlefront.
Many aspects of Cold Warriors are particularly effective, though I also have a few critiques. Overall, I see the book as an important contribution to Cold War historiography, reminding us that the printed word was more than a passive artifact of the era: it was a potent force shaping minds, shifting alliances, and keeping alive the possibility of dissent. By weaving personal narratives into the broader geopolitical context, White shows just how heavily both superpowers invested in shaping cultural opinion.
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White’s microhistories feature sixteen literary figures whose stories punctuate Cold War history. Not every writer receives the same consideration: multiple chapters focus on George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Isaac Babel, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene, Anna Akhmatova, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and John le Carré (David Cornwell), all of whom provide a throughline for the story of the literary Cold War. This is not to say that those profiled in single chapters get short shrift; the chapters on literary figures such as Richard Wright, Gioconda Belli, and Václav Havel are well crafted and contribute meaningfully to White’s overall project. Cold Warriors excels by letting readers grasp both the high-level tension of the era and the personal stakes each writer faced.
The sequence of biographical chapters takes the reader through the entire history of the Cold War, starting with the 1930s and 1940s, setting the stage for the conflict. White begins by tracing the roots of these ideological battles to the Spanish Civil War. Figures like Orwell, Koestler, and Stephen Spender entered the war as communists (Koestler) or, at least, sympathetic to communist ideals (Orwell and Spender), only to emerge horrified by Stalin’s purges of rival leftist factions in Spain. This moment was critical for Western intellectuals, fracturing what had previously been a popular front movement against fascism. These rifts deepened with the show trials of Stalin’s Great Terror, followed by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, causing many Western writers—including Koestler and McCarthy—to distance themselves from Soviet-style communism. Some on the left continued to see the USSR as an idealized future for the West, while others shifted to a democratic socialism opposed to Russian authoritarianism. Meanwhile, within the USSR, Stalin demanded that literature adhere to socialist realism and rigid conformity to Party dictates. During the Great Terror, famous writers like Isaac Babel were swept up and tortured into confessing “anti-revolutionary” crimes. Babel was eventually executed, driving home the lethal stakes for Russian authors who refused to propagandize on the Kremlin’s terms. Finally, during World War II, writers began to recognize the repressive qualities shared by fascism and communism. Koestler published his groundbreaking novel Darkness at Noon, and, toward the war’s end, Orwell released the even more impactful Animal Farm. As Nazi Germany was defeated, the brief alliance between liberal democracies in the West and the USSR quickly lost its purpose.
The book then moves into the first two decades of the Cold War, from the late 1940s through the late 1960s, when geopolitical tensions peaked, and each side used literature to export ideological ideas (the “book race”) while also stepping up efforts to police domestic literary expression. In the West, the “book race” was led by diplomatic and intelligence agencies, whose goal was to influence the global intelligentsia. The CIA, emulating Soviet front organizations, bankrolled literary magazines, publishing houses, and cultural conferences for left-wing intellectuals critical of the USSR. State agencies and their front organizations promoted texts sympathetic to Western liberalism but also supported the concept of free expression by disseminating modernist experimentation—even work critical of America, capitalism, etc. “The dynamics of the Cold War made the government the champion of difficult elitist art—that of James Joyce, Jackson Pollock, and William Faulkner—in large part because it was banned in Moscow.” Within the US, however, the short-lived Red Scare brought about social and economic pressure on any writer deemed pro-Soviet or communist, and in rare cases actual repression. The most high-profile example is Howard Fast, the author of Spartacus and Freedom Road, who was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) but refused to name other party members or disclose information; Fast was imprisoned for three months for contempt of Congress.
Meanwhile, following the war, Stalin kept a tight grip on Russia’s literary publications and stepped-up production of Party-approved books. It remained perilous for writers to fall out of favor with the Party, aptly demonstrated in White’s chapters on the poet Anna Akhmatova, who struggled to preserve even a semblance of artistic freedom. Moreover, the Cold War turned the Nobel Prize for Literature into a symbolic contest. Although Soviet publishers deemed Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago politically problematic due to its critical portrayal of the Revolution, the text was smuggled out of the USSR and published in Italy, soon becoming an international bestseller. Pasternak’s ensuing acclaim resulted in the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1958; however, under pressure from Soviet authorities, he declined to accept it.
Of course, the death of Stalin was a key milestone for both the USSR and the Cold War. Under Khrushchev, there were brief glimmers of cultural thaw, but many of these policies were later reversed. The high-profile trials of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel drew international outrage and paved the way for more dissident activity among Russian intellectuals.
In the waning decades of the Cold War, the USSR showed signs of an exhausted political system run by an ossified, remote class of party elites. In contrast, the West experienced the cultural and political upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, only to emerge with an enhanced, diversified culture, including the depth and breadth of its literary expression. This impacted the communist bloc. For example, Václav Havel’s experience reflects the Western influence of the era, which would lead him, ultimately, to move from playwright to political figure, and to embody the convergence of literary activism and direct resistance to Soviet communism. Within the Soviet Union, dissent became bolder as samizdat flourished in underground networks, and more writers were willing to risk the ire of the state in pursuit of free literary expression. The best example, of course, is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was allowed to publish under the brief opening provided by Khrushchev but then faced suppression of his later work and subsequent KGB monitoring and harassment. Like Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn’s work was published in the West, and he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, which brought about a diplomatic row between the USSR and the West. Briefly protected by his global reputation, Solzhenitsyn was eventually deported in 1974. Under Gorbachev and glasnost, both state control over literature and the cultural competition with the West died down or was, at least, deemphasized.
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I was glad White dedicated a dozen or so chapters to the pre–Cold War experiences of his featured writers. These sections illustrate how Western intellectuals who initially sympathized with the USSR and communism were alienated by Russia’s conduct in the Spanish Civil War, the Great Terror, and its wars with Finland and Poland. This fractured what had been a popular front movement led by the USSR against fascism, and Stalin’s reign produced an East–West schism that would continue to shape Soviet fortunes throughout the Cold War.
Koestler and Orwell receive more attention than the other literary figures—and justifiably so. They were among the first to sound the alarm about how dangerous Stalin was. Unlike “useful idiots” such as Walter Duranty, who obscured the famine in Ukraine in his reporting, Koestler and Orwell held firmly to their egalitarian beliefs and refused to look the other way as the USSR purged socialists and anarchists from Republican forces. They appear to be among the first prominent Western intellectuals who subscribed to socialism but rejected the USSR’s brand of communism.
Similarly, White’s chapters on Mary McCarthy are especially revealing, showing how she navigated internecine conflicts among American communists and socialists. Although McCarthy stood as a principled opponent of Stalinism in the 1940s and 1950s, during her visit to North Vietnam later in her career, she allowed herself to become a tool of propaganda, championing a totalitarian regime at war with her own country—an unfortunate turn that left her an embarrassment by the end of her writing career.
Finally, White’s chapters on Solzhenitsyn and Havel are particularly effective in illustrating the sclerotic nature of communist governance in the Cold War’s final years.
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As for complaints, I have a few, which I’ll address in order of seriousness and importance.
I think many readers will notice a dissymmetry in Cold Warriors: there are multiple chapters on the state suppression of Russian writers, and there are many chapters focused on anti-communist writers in the West, but almost nothing on the USSR’s efforts to spread pro-communist or anti-West literature in the West. Granted, Howard Fast, Graham Greene, and Gioconda Belli were certainly critics of American foreign policy and activists (especially Belli, who had to flee Nicaragua under the Somoza regime). However, one might wish for a bit more detail on USSR-funded cultural projects, whether official or unofficial. Although White underscores the Comintern’s early sophistication in running programs aimed at making a cultural impact, the book’s focus remains on how writers within the Soviet Union endured oppression and how writers in the West opposed the Soviet Union, with little about any author who wrote for Soviet-funded journals or publishing houses.
Perhaps White thought adding two chapters on Kim Philby would help compensate for the uneven coverage. Unfortunately, Philby just doesn’t belong in this book. It seems White is relying on a transitive power of association: Philby was a member of British intelligence like Graham Greene and John le Carré (David Cornwell), and he associated with many of the writers featured. White’s explanation was that Philby helped to “clarify the way espionage and literature become so fascinatingly intertwined during the Cold War—Philby did not write fiction; he lived it.” Yet while he’s undeniably a fascinating historical figure, the chapters about him don’t contribute very much to the book’s focus on Cold War literature.
Additionally, I found White’s coverage of the Red Scare quite effective, and Howard Fast was an excellent focal point for examining McCarthyism. Nevertheless, I think the book’s discussion would have benefited from more historiographical context around the Red Scare of the 1950s. This was certainly not the first time the US government attempted to police free expression. World War I saw the first systemic, top-down program to monitor and police free speech. The Wilson Administration’s Committee on Public Information (the Creel Committee) engaged in pro-war messaging and censorship of criticism, and the 1917 Espionage Act (and its amendment, the Sedition Act of 1918) was a new assertion of Federal power to regulated speech. This was soon followed by the First Red Scare in 1919 (the 1950s was actually the second). Furthermore, White might have noted that the Red Scare preceded the Supreme Court’s articulation of more robust First Amendment jurisprudence, which developed under the Warren and Burger Courts.
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Cold Warriors stands out as a deeply researched and vividly narrated account of how the Cold War shaped the lives of a handful of brilliant writers. Duncan White’s microhistorical approach offers keen insights into the human dimension of the conflict, making for a refreshing change of pace from standard superpower-focused histories.