In The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature (2025) journalist Charlie English writes of the power of books and other forms of the written word to resist oppression.
Set primarily in 1980s Poland during the final decade of the Soviet Union’s control of Eastern Europe, The CIA Book Club examines the resistance to an oppressive authoritarian regime in a Poland within the orbit of the larger Soviet Empire.
And, while many other nations of the Eastern Bloc in Europe were similarly under the boot of Soviet control, Poland stands out as one of those most fiercely resistant. Indeed, much of what took place in Poland in the 1980s is widely seen as precipitating the collapse of Soviet power and influence by 1991; brought about not through the barrel of a gun but rather with the circulation of ideas that challenged the propaganda of the oppressors.
During the 1970s, Polish labor unions—eventually coming under the banner of Solidarity—organized the fight against the government by demanding basic social rights, fair wages, and a move towards democracy. With millions of members, Solidarity exercised a great deal of control, primarily through organized labor stoppages.
The government became so threatened that in December of 1981 it instituted a state of martial law. Armed soldiers roamed the streets and demanded identity papers. Citizens were often taken into custody and interrogated. The slightest crimes against the state were met with severe punishment. A six-day work-week was mandated. Workers were required to take loyalty oaths. Surveillance of the population was wide-spread. Government agents infiltrated labor unions and resistance organizations.
(If any of this sounds familiar, remember that authoritarianism comes with a time-tested and effective playbook; demonstrate force and a willingness to do harm, promote the virtues of the state and punish detractors as unpatriotic, deport those deemed unfit, pit citizens against one another and, perhaps most important, control the narrative.)
And, as we are beginning to see in America’s streets today, protestors using violence often serve to feed the narrative promoted by the state through channels of information increasingly controlled by the state; that those resisting the state are criminals and state power is necessary to keep us safe. On the other hand, the success of the Polish resistance in the 1980s relied upon limiting the violence and promoting a counter-narrative to the state’s propaganda. So, unlike the resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II, Polish resistance in the 1980s did not rely upon sabotage and guerilla-style attacks on the occupiers. Rather, resisters fought back by keeping alive the very idea of liberty. This was achieved through an organized underground publishing industry that printed, imported, and distributed banned books, newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets. Facilitating this effort, as Charlie English has uncovered, were millions of dollars in cash, equipment, and supplies funneled into Poland by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. As we are to see, this, unlike many other CIA operations, was money well-spent.
It helped that these funds represented only a small fraction of the CIA’s Cold War budget while the agency was funding proxy wars all around the world. In the Eastern Bloc nations however, instigating military activity carried with it the threat of Soviet invasion and the possibility of nuclear war. And, fighting the Cold War with books made all the sense in the world. It was, after all, a competition between vastly differing world views.
Besides documenting the horrors of this era in magazines and newspapers, many of the most impactful books struck a blow at the propagandized “virtues” of communism; George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, several works by Alexander Solzhenitsyn including The Gulag Archipelago, and several Polish publications including The Issa Valley by Nobel Prize-winning author Czeslaw Milosz. Other banned American writers included Hannah Arendt, Joseph Brodsky, Phili p Roth, John le Carré, Aldous Huxley, and Kurt Vonnegut.
In an underground periodical titled Kultura: “Of all the… activities [of Poland’s resistance], the most important today is to inform, educate, and stimulate political thinking. For this we need underground publications, newspapers, magazines, tapes, and books.”
With books and printing presses costing far less than guns and ammunition, the funding of Polish resistance was less the product of an organized CIA campaign and more the effort of a single agent. George Minden was “head of a covert intelligence operation known as the ‘CIA book program’ which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture. This “’book club’ sent ten million banned titles into the East… Nowhere were the books welcomed more warmly than in Poland where the texts would circulate covertly among circles of like-minded readers, quietly making the case against Soviet communism.”
While Minden offered the funding, it was the Polish people themselves who took the great risks to keep the spirit of liberty alive. Possession of banned material and the printers and copiers necessary to publish were criminal acts. Even possession of paper and ink put one under suspicion.
“In October 1985, a Polish human rights group estimated that the majority of the 320 political prisoners still held in the country were printers, distributors, editors, or other collaborators with the social publishing movement.”
Unfortunately, many of the events portrayed in this book mirror the tactics of would-be authoritarians in our own day; including the false pretense of justice and ridiculing legitimate media institutions. In one instance in Poland of 1984—an appropriate year for this kind of thing—a vehicle carrying contraband was seized and several resisters were arrested. During what the state called a “trial,” the prosecutor presented evidence that “[o]f the 800 publications aboard the truck, only ten were judged to be legal. The contents of the rest included ‘fake news capable of causing serious damage to the interests of the People’s Republic of Poland…’”
There was some diversity among the resisters that played to their benefit. For instance, Polish women commandeered an outsize role in much of this underground activity. While Poland’s secret police arrested hundreds of male resisters, women were not targeted as routinely, simply because the chauvinistic police forces could not conceive of women engaging in these types of subversive activities.
With this diverse representation among the resistance, it is no surprise that Poland’s history of repeated occupation motivated an equally fervent history of underground publishing which served to maintain a healthy sense of Polish culture and history “keeping the flame of independence alive in the private spaces of family homes, living rooms, and Poles’ own minds.”
It is no coincidence, with this flourishing of forbidden cultural activity that, as English writes, “Poland was the most crucial of Eastern Bloc nations [and] when communism collapsed in 1989, this was the first domino to fall…”
And when it came to establishing a democratic society following the collapse of communism, Poland’s underground emerged as an organized society to rebuild the country’s institutions. Unlike other Eastern Bloc nations in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, “decades of underground literary activity gave the new Polish leaders a head start. All the effort spent working to develop a parallel civil society, with its own publishing concerns, libraries, and universities meant that… there was a ready-made administrative class who had already thought through the major policy issues facing the country.”
As one Polish thinker wrote, this underground society “enabled Poland to execute the fundamental economic transformation, self-government, and above all enable it to join NATO and the European Union.”
As we examine our own increasingly oppressive world it seems that it will continue to be necessary to take to the streets in solidarity with those facing oppression at the hands of the state. We should also keep in mind that, just as there are some universal truths in establishing an authoritarian regime; Charles English’s enlightening book suggests that there may also be some universal truths regarding how best to fight back.
