> Books were a means of “breaking down the ideological and cultural Iron Curtain,” English writes, “opening wide a window on the culture and achievements of the free Western world.” ^h27580962 > A second category of CIA-backed works concerned anti-totalitarian political fiction and nonfiction, the most prominent of which were George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm,” as well as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” and “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Although not as overtly political, Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” was also popular; a copy was even requested by a member of the Polish parliament. ^h27580968 > I am convinced it was books that were victorious in the fight. A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity. A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad ^h27580976 > All book distribution is politically significant because all books — political and literary — serve the political function of making the ideological isolation of Eastern Europe difficult, thereby frustrating one of the communists’ main political objectives. For the communists, too, all Western books, whether political or non-political, are politically significant and feared as such. ^h27580982