78 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
authors such as Shakespeare, Byron and Dante. Indeed, the claim was
made that the USSR was the only state where most people had easy
access to such works of art. Under Khrushchëv and Brezhnev the scope
of permitted translations was expanded. Readers could buy books by
Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. The novels
of John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway were widely on sale. Appar-
ently the authorities felt that Soviet citizens could be trusted to discern
the critique of the system that such authors portrayed.^1
Glavlit banned any works that eulogized the market economy, reli-
gion or the social hierarchy in capitalist countries. The security forces
backed this up with a number of practical precautions. The KGB had
long been alert to the way that dissenters could use typewriters and
carbon paper to copy illicit material. Every typewriter in the country
had to be registered with the authorities. Since every machine made its
own peculiar imprint on the page, this would theoretically enable the
security police to ascertain who was the source of the trouble. Photo-
copiers were regarded with even greater concern.^2 Only a few were
obtained even for the highest level of state institutions – and every-
body was strictly forbidden to run them for private purposes. Personal
computers, which were becoming a standard item of domestic equip-
ment in the advanced capitalist West, were almost unknown in the
USSR. Libraries kept Western journals and magazines in rooms
reserved for only the most trusted of readers. In the Leningrad
Academy of Sciences library it was possible for senior physicists to
consult monthlies such as the London-based Nature. But staff cut out
advertisements which were thought likely to spread ideological con-
tamination. The irritating result was that researchers could not read
the scientific text on the obverse sides of such pages.^3
It was reported that 70,000 lectures were delivered daily in the
USSR to counteract ‘alien influence’ from abroad.^4 Marxism-Leninism
was purveyed in schools, libraries and the media. The Politburo recog-
nized that its doctrines were having less impact as people learned to
ignore exaggeration and outright falsification. Whereas in the 1930s it
had laid claim to supremacy in every branch of human knowledge, it
steadily came to reduce its messages to a core of fundamental prin-
ciples. Lenin was depicted as a secular saint who did no wrong; his
embalmed corpse was kept on display in a mausoleum below the walls
of the Kremlin on Red Square. The October Revolution of 1917
was interpreted as the pinnacle of human achievement. Communism
was predicted to spread worldwide. The USSR was hymned for saving