By Gary Saul Morson

When I first traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1960s, I was given a few books -- including Russian translations of the Bible and George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" -- and told to leave them on a park bench for someone to read or sell. Later I was surprised to learn that the ultimate source of funding for these books was the Central Intelligence Agency. Like most young people at the time, I thought all the CIA did was spy on, and sometimes overturn, unfriendly governments. As Charlie English points out in "The CIA Book Club," the agency's most successful operation had nothing to do with secret agents or gun-running. It was all about literature.

More than one scholar has recently argued that what ultimately brought down the U.S.S.R. was the spread of values and ideas, incompatible with communism, to be found in great works of literature and philosophy. Mr. English relates lines written by the Polish anticommunist intellectual Adam Michnik: "A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity." Despite the best efforts of the regime to prevent smuggling and jam Western radio broadcasts, poet Czes aw Mi osz noted, the free word "slips over borders more rapidly and effectively than people on the outside imagine."

The title of Mr. English's book is somewhat misleading for two reasons. First, it deals entirely with Poland, whereas the CIA book and broadcast projects reached the entire Soviet bloc. Second, the main story he tells concerns not the CIA but a group of plucky and shrewd Poles who devised endless forms of book-smuggling. Forbidden works were "smuggled in trucks, aboard yachts, sent by balloon, by mail, or in travelers' luggage. Mini-editions were hidden in the sheet music of touring musicians, packed into food tins or Tampax boxes."

Mr. English's main hero, Miros av Chojecki, went one step further and set up illegal publishing ventures for homegrown titles. That required remarkable organizational skills. Mr. Chojecki employed dozens of people, obtained offset printers, scrounged for spare parts and somehow set up distribution networks under the eyes of the secret police. The risks were enormous and the chances of slip-ups endless, so it is remarkable how successful Mr. Chojecki and his imitators were. The CIA's main role was to pay for all this clandestine activity and find ways to get prohibited equipment across the border.

In the 19th century, Polish opponents of czarist rule set up "flying universities" -- which had no fixed location for czarist officials to find -- where prohibited works and ideas circulated. Inspired by this model, Poles under Soviet rule invented flying libraries and flying publishing houses. Also on the 19th-century model, the Polish émigré community, especially in France, played a decisive role. From Paris, Jerzy Giedroyc launched the literary-political magazine Kultura, which published some of the greatest Polish writers and thinkers of the 20th century, including Mi osz, who won the 1980 Nobel Prize for literature. In addition to funding Kultura, the CIA also set up Polish bookstores, which gave free volumes to traveling Poles who promised to take them home.

Mr. English describes the labyrinthine vicissitudes of all this dissident activity, including the rise of the independent trade union Solidarity, which briefly compelled the government to recognize it and allow it to publish as it wished. For the Soviets, who represented their rule as that of the proletariat, an independent trade union was unthinkable. In 1981, just as the Soviets were about to invade, Polish general Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski persuaded them to let him impose martial law instead. Although direct Soviet rule would have been much worse, Jaruzelski's regime was brutal. Mr. Chojecki was then abroad raising money for his operations, and so, instead of returning, he set up his own intricate smuggling operation from abroad.

Tacit resistance gripped the country. As an essay in Kultura observed, "It is naturally difficult to expect a nation of many millions to go underground on a daily basis. But . . . a nation of many millions can, while living and working within the framework of an 'official country,' remain spiritually faithful to the 'real country.' " Mr. English shrewdly observes that Poland was better prepared for life after communism because it had already developed "a parallel civil society" that could serve as "a ready-made administrative class who had already thought through the major policy issues facing the country."

Occasionally, Mr. English chooses his words carelessly. Poland suffered greatly under Nazi rule, he observes, but "when Stalin's troops liberated Warsaw there was no let-up." In that case, why call it a liberation, as Soviet propaganda did? Referring to the crucial support President Ronald Reagan, overruling his advisers, insisted on providing Solidarity in its darkest days, Mr. English explains: "In Reagan's Manichaean worldview, communism was evil and Solidarity was made up of heroes" resembling the American revolutionaries. Why the condescending tone? One doesn't need a "Manichaean worldview" to regard communism as evil, and Mr. English's own narrative demonstrates the heroism of many Poles who risked their lives for their country's freedom.

Lech Wa sa, Mr. Michnik, Mr. Chojecki and other Polish leaders consistently rejected the views of the small group called Fighting Solidarity, which advocated guerrilla warfare. When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev indicated that he would not again use force on Eastern bloc countries, the advocates of intellectual resistance were proved right. Literature had won. As the leader of the Warsaw branch of Solidarity, Zbigniew Bujak, had memorably observed, "Once resistance had meant taking up a gun. Now, people instinctively took up typewriters."

In the U.S.S.R., too, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other great writers proved more powerful than Westerners thought possible. "Literature, together with language, protects the soul of the nation," Solzhenitsyn explained in his Nobel Prize lecture, which concludes with a Russian proverb: "One word of truth shall outweigh the world."

--Mr. Morson is the author of "Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter."

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July 11, 2025 08:45 ET (12:45 GMT)

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