Nicholas Shakespeare: Novel explosives of the Cold War
Readers put perhaps
not more trust but a different kind of trust in the perception of writers they
know as novelists… What we can do, perhaps better than the next man, is smell a
rat...
Written to undermine
Stalinism and the rabid purges that Orwell witnessed in Spain — ‘the special
world created by secret police forces, censorship of opinion, torture and
frame-up trials’ — Animal Farm was completed in three
weeks. Nineteen Eighty-Four took three years longer. Published
in 1949, and set, not in Russia, but in a future Britain which, White nicely
reminds us, had become a mere colony of the US, renamed ‘Airstrip One’, it was
immediately recognised as ‘the most powerful weapon yet deployed in the
cultural Cold War’.
Behind the Iron
Curtain, Stalin’s chief cultural propagandist, Andrei Zhdanov, insisted that
Soviet literature was ‘the most advanced literature in the world’ because ‘it
does not and cannot have other interests besides the interests of the state’.
In pursuit of ‘socialist realism’, brigades of writers were encouraged to write
collective novels about the factory to which they had been assigned. The
penalty for not doing so was in general as dire as the result. The poet Anna
Akhmatova, who, like Solzhenitsyn, had to tear up and swallow or bury her work,
reckoned that ‘not a single piece of literature’ was printed under Stalin’s
poisonous rule.
One of myriad mediocre
talents hitched to communism’s disintegrating band-wagon was the Russian
novelist Alexander Fadeyev. Co-founder and chairman of the Union of Soviet
Writers, he had signed letters which led to his fellow authors being arrested,
and sometimes worse: an estimated 1,500 writers lost their lives in Stalin’s
purges, among them Mandelstam, Isaac Babel and Boris Pilnyak. But the price of
selling his soul to ‘the satrap Stalin’ became too high, and on 13 May 1956
Fadeyev shot himself. His suicide note mourned how literature had been
‘debased, persecuted and destroyed’, and the best writers ‘physically
exterminated’.
Dissident writers were
treated less barbarically in America. One famous leader of the communist cause
was Howard Fast, who at a protest against anti-communists was observed
‘fighting with a Coke bottle in each hand’. Still, his books were burned and
removed from libraries in Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunt, and Fast was sent
to prison at Mill Point where he conceived his novel Spartacus, which
became a self-published bestseller and Hollywood movie.
Nor was the US spared
its enemy’s hypocrisies and complicities. America’s declared pre-war wish to
champion self-determination lost out to the stronger impulse to contain the
spread of communism and find new resources, as in oil-rich Iran, where a joint
CIA–SIS coup toppled the elected leader. Elsewhere, America propped up repressive
right-wing dictatorships in South Vietnam (as fictionalised in Graham
Greene’s The Quiet American), Cuba (Our Man in Havana) and
South and Central America, the supreme act of hypocrisy being the Iran-Contra
Affair... read more:
