<
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/22/it-allowed-us-to-survive-to-not-go-mad-the-cia-book-smuggling-operation-that-helped-bring-down-communism>
"The volume’s glossy dust jacket shows a 1970s computer room, where high
priests of the information age, dressed in kipper ties and flares, tap
instructions into the terminals of some ancient mainframe. The only words on
the front read “Master Operating Station”, “Subsidiary Operating Station” and
“Free Standing Display”. Is any publication less appetising than an out-of-date
technical manual?
Turn inside, however, and the book reveals a secret. It isn’t a computer manual
at all, but a Polish language edition of
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George
Orwell’s famous anti-totalitarian novel, which was banned for decades by
communist censors in the eastern bloc.
This copy lives now in the library of Warsaw University, but for much of the
cold war it belonged to the Polish writer and dissident Teresa Bogucka. It was
Teresa’s father, the art critic Janusz Bogucki, who first brought it to Poland.
In 1957, during a window of liberalisation that opened after Stalin’s death,
Janusz picked up the Orwell translation from a Polish bookshop in Paris,
smuggled it back through the border and gave it to his daughter. Teresa was
only 10 or 11 years old then, but she was a precocious reader, and recognised
the ways in which communist Poland mirrored Orwell’s fictional dystopian state:
“It absolutely traumatised me,” she remembered.
Years later, in 1976, when Bogucka joined the emerging Polish opposition
movement, she decided to create a library of books that had bypassed the state
censor, and donated her own small collection, including this
Nineteen
Eighty-Four. The SB security service, Poland’s KGB, kept continual watch on
her, eavesdropping on her conversations, arresting her and searching her
apartment, so she asked neighbours to store the forbidden books. Much of the
time, though, they would be circulating among readers, since this would be a
“Flying Library”, which rarely touched the ground.
Bogucka’s system of covert lending ran through a network of coordinators, each
of whom was responsible for their own tight group of readers. She sorted the
books into categories – politics, economics, history, literature – and divided
them into packages of 10, before allocating each coordinator a particular day
to pick up their parcel, which they carried away in a rucksack. The coordinator
would drop the books back the following month at a different address, before
picking up a new set.
The demand for Bogucka’s books was such that soon she needed more, and these
could only come from the west. Activist friends passed word to London, where
émigré publishers arranged shipments of 30 or 40 volumes at a time, smuggling
them through the iron curtain aboard the sleeper trains that shuttled back and
forth between Paris and Moscow, stopping in Poland along the way. By 1978,
Teresa Bogucka’s Flying Library had a stock of 500 prohibited titles.
How many people read her copy of Orwell’s book in those crucial cold war years?
Hundreds, probably thousands. And this was just one of millions of titles that
arrived illegally in Poland at that time. As well as via trains, books arrived
by every possible conveyance: aboard yachts; in secret compartments built into
vans and trucks; by balloon; in the post. Mini-editions were slipped into the
sheet music of touring musicians, or packed into food tins or Tampax boxes. In
one instance, a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
The Gulag Archipelago was
carried on a flight to Warsaw hidden in a baby’s nappy."
Via Rhysy.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
