Books for liberty

George C. Minden, 85, Dies; Led a Cold War of Words

Douglas Martin in the Times: George C. Minden, who for 37 years ran a secret American program that put 10 million Western books and magazines in the hands of intellectuals and professionals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, died on April 9 at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.

The cause was complications of gastric lymphoma, his son John said.

Mr. Minden was president of the International Literary Center, an organization financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, which tried to win influential friends by giving them reading material unavailable in their own countries. The material ranged from dictionaries, medical texts and novels by Joyce and Nabokov to art museum catalogs and Parisian fashion magazines.

The people who received the reading matter were generally Communists or professionals and intellectuals working for Communist regimes. They thought the books were being donated by Western publishers and cultural organizations.

The C.I.A.'s purpose was to offer an alternative, culturally engaging reality that had the implicit effect of promoting Western culture. Mr. Minden did not see a need to bluntly refute Marxist dogma, on the theory that people could use common sense and their own observations to reject Communist arguments.

The project became something of a personalized book club; files were kept on recipients' reading tastes, so as to better satisfy them in the future. It replaced earlier, frankly propagandistic programs, including mass dropping of anti-Communist leaflets from high-altitude balloons.

Mr. Minden wrote in an internal memo that the West's main obstacle was "not Marxist obstacles, but a vacuum," and that "what is needed is something against frustration and stultification, against a life full of omissions."

John P. C. Matthews wrote in 2003 in The International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence — in one of the few public discussions of the program — that the initiative sprinkled reality into an "unnatural and ultimately irrational" system.

When Communism collapsed, in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Soviet Union in 1991, Mr. Matthews, who had worked in the book program, suggested that Mr. Minden had laid the foundation for a smoother relationship among opinion leaders in a post-Communist world.

"Intellectuals in the East understood intellectuals in the West because they had been reading the same books," he wrote.

It's the kind of program that makes you shake your head--on the one hand there's a certain nobleness to it from the point of view of its direct participants, on the other the structure of the whole things suggests such great cynicism by Minden's masters.

There's also an element of wishful thinking in this obituary; people in the world of words like to think that because some people in Communist countries read some of our (or their) books, they understood their fellow intellectuals, if no one else.

But I think the messiness of the reunification of Germany shows how different even people raised pretty much on the same books/history/language can be, even if they 'understand' each other. And given how vicious differences of interpretation even in our own society can be (what does the Bible mean by the meek shall inherit the earth?), and how cruel quarrels between intellectuals can be (see: Tom Wolfe calls Irving, Mailer and Updike "the Three Stooges"), who knows what the real impact of Minden's program was.

Not that it should be measured solely by real-world standards; the good intentions of Mr. Minden and his fellow travelers should count for something. And any happiness it brought to any Eastern European reader was certainly worthwhile in its own right, even if it was only a private pleasure.

And then, however misdirected, there are the wonderful homey touches on both sides....

The book mailings began in July 1956, and Mr. Minden took over the program, which has had several names, that year. An early idea was to send a publisher's catalog, inviting people to make one or two choices. A note usually suggested that the recipient send a book in return to make it appear a legitimate exchange.

In 2005, Ludmilla Thorne, an employee of the program, wrote a letter to The New Yorker that noted the program's ingenuity in distributing books and acknowledged that it was financed by the C.I.A. She said that members of the Moscow Philharmonic slipped book pages into their sheet music and that a young woman flying from London to Moscow with her infant son squeezed a mini-edition of Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" into the child's diaper.

By 1991, more than 300,000 books and magazines were being distributed annually, making the overall total more than 10 million. Fully a third of the recipients in later years sent thank-you letters, which along with many other papers, Mr. Minden donated to the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace.

Perhaps 1,000 people in publishing knew about the program, because they were participants. Intellectuals in the Soviet Union and its satellites marveled at the altruism of the publishers they thought of as their benefactors. (Mr. Matthews noted that the publishers made a tidy profit.)

Image of Bend Sinister cover via Kristykay website.