Cold War Studies

Before, During, and After the Cold War

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CIA Book Group

CIA Book Group

Intro:

During the Cold War, books were weapons. Titles like 1984 and Doctor Zhivago were banned in the Soviet bloc — and secretly smuggled in by CIA couriers. Today, some of those same works appear on American school ban lists.

The CIA Book Group explores these books, the worlds they disrupted, and the people who risked everything to disseminate them and read them.

How We Might Organize Our Reading:

There are different paths through the material — and you can help decide. A few possibilities:

  • Political Dissidence (The Gulag Archipelago, The Power of the Powerless)

  • Totalitarianism in Fiction (1984, Darkness at Noon)

  • Ex-Communist Converts (The God That Failed)

  • Spiritual Resistance (Mere Christianity, Man’s Search for Meaning)

  • Forbidden Western Classics (The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye)

Sample Book List: Core Fiction & Literature

These novels were considered ideologically powerful in their critique of authoritarianism. They are just a sampling of the work we have to draw from.

  1. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
  2. 1984 – George Orwell
  3. Animal Farm – George Orwell
  4. Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
  5. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  6. The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  7. The Trial – Franz Kafka
  8. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
  9. The Plague – Albert Camus
  10. The Stranger – Albert Camus
  11. Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates
  12. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
  13. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
  14. The Captive Mind – Czesław Miłosz
  15. The First Circle – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  16. We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
  17. Life and Fate – Vasily Grossman
  18. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
  19. Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky (widely used for moral/philosophical critique)

Ready to Join Us?

We’re just getting started — and you can help shape the group from the ground up.

To join, send an email to [lisa@coldwarstudies.com] with YES in the subject line.

I’ll send you a short survey by email so you can help decide which books and themes we read first. I can’t wait to get your YES!