If Books Could Kill: Leo Tolstoy and the Cultural Cold War

Abstract

Drawing on declassified Central Intelligence Agency files and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) archives held at the University of Chicago, this essay investigates how the CIA and its cover organizations sought to manipulate the legacy of Leo Tolstoy as part of the larger Cultural Cold War. In 1960, the CCF marked the fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoy's death by organizing a conference that attracted a wide range of writers and academics from around the world. Secretly sponsored by the CIA, the Tolstoy gathering, which took place in Venice in the summer of 1960, was intended to counter similar events planned by the Soviets, which the CIA feared would portray the Russian novelist as a prophet of Bolshevism. In response, the West hoped to claim Tolstoy as a thinker whose individualist philosophy was unassimilable to either Marxism or capitalism. Essentially, they sought to secularize his Christian anarchism as a form of radical liberty. However, this essay argues, the intelligence community's appropriation of the humanities ultimately conflicts with the pacifist writer's antipathy toward state sponsorship of the arts and the weaponization of culture in the service of nationalistic agendas.