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"medical texts and novels by Joyce and Nabokov ..." (CIA program)
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[EDNOTE. Sandy Klein forwards this obituary for George C. Minden from today's New York 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.
George Caputineanu Minden was born on Feb. 19, 1921, in Bucharest, Romania, where he grew up in a wealthy, cosmopolitan household. He learned to speak six languages, including Latin, and at 18 he inherited an estate that included vast oil fields.
He graduated at the top of his class from the University of Bucharest's law school. In 1946, as the Communists were taking control of Romania, he fled to England with his first wife, Margarete Schmidt. His lands and fortune were confiscated.
He taught at Cambridge and studied at the London School of Economics, then left England after his marriage collapsed. He taught languages in Spain and Mexico and was a director of a small automobile company in Paris.
In Madrid, he met Marilyn Miller, an American, whom he married in 1954. They moved to New York, where Mr. Minden became head of the Romanian desk at Free Europe Press, an affiliate of Radio Free Europe.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three sons, Nicholas, of Lausanne, Switzerland, John, of Manhattan, and Paul, of Los Angeles; a daughter, Michaela Duffy of Manhattan; four grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
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.)
Mr. Minden was noticed by the Czech secret police, who wrote in their journal about a mysterious, immaculately dressed "man in a gray suit" who kept turning up at Czech exile centers, Mr. Matthews wrote.
But the police never mentioned Mr. Minden's name or gave any indication that they knew about his "Marshall Plan for the mind."
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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.
George Caputineanu Minden was born on Feb. 19, 1921, in Bucharest, Romania, where he grew up in a wealthy, cosmopolitan household. He learned to speak six languages, including Latin, and at 18 he inherited an estate that included vast oil fields.
He graduated at the top of his class from the University of Bucharest's law school. In 1946, as the Communists were taking control of Romania, he fled to England with his first wife, Margarete Schmidt. His lands and fortune were confiscated.
He taught at Cambridge and studied at the London School of Economics, then left England after his marriage collapsed. He taught languages in Spain and Mexico and was a director of a small automobile company in Paris.
In Madrid, he met Marilyn Miller, an American, whom he married in 1954. They moved to New York, where Mr. Minden became head of the Romanian desk at Free Europe Press, an affiliate of Radio Free Europe.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three sons, Nicholas, of Lausanne, Switzerland, John, of Manhattan, and Paul, of Los Angeles; a daughter, Michaela Duffy of Manhattan; four grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
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.)
Mr. Minden was noticed by the Czech secret police, who wrote in their journal about a mysterious, immaculately dressed "man in a gray suit" who kept turning up at Czech exile centers, Mr. Matthews wrote.
But the police never mentioned Mr. Minden's name or gave any indication that they knew about his "Marshall Plan for the mind."
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm