BOOK HUNGER IN THE USSR

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP87-00462R000100110028-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 30, 2009
• Sequence Number: 28
• Publication Date: January 31, 1985
• Content Type: REPORT

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)/-?/ 1, /J! 5 -
THE DIRECTOR OF
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
National Intelligence Council
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FEBRUARY 1985
Kennan Institute Fellow John Garrard,
professor of Russian literature at the
University of Arizona, spoke at the
Wilson Center January 9 about the
"Politics and Economics of Book Hunger in
the USSR." All kinds of books are in
short supply in the Soviet Union; Gar-
rard's talk focused on fiction, not
"subversive" material, such as samizdat.
According to recent emigres and
Soviet publishing officials, the growing
demand for books in the USSR stems large-
ly from a rise in Soviet educational
levels over the last 15 years. Reading
is fashionable and book collections are
status symbols. The Soviet leadership
should feel good, according to Garrard:
book hunger proves a certain "intellec-
tualization" of society, and it suggests
the Russian people are materially better
off.
Soviet publishing officials have
tried to remedy the chronic book short-
age. Throughout the USSR, for example,
they have established 50-60 "pulping"
centers where individuals can exchange
unwanted books for tickets entitling them
to top positions on waiting lists for
books they do want. There have been
complaints in the Soviet press, however,
that many of the books taken to the
pulping centers are stolen from public
libraries. Book hunger thus continues to
spawn responses like those provoked by
other shortages in Soviet society-private
initiative, end runs around the official
distribution system, a black market.
While the Soviets publish huge num-
bers of books, too often they are not
the ones people want to read. Many are
"official" publications-political works
THE WILSON CENTER REPORTS
NATT
and memoirs, for example. There is even
a shortage of contemporary Soviet fiction
and Russian classics, which are published
in large numbers. Soviet presses simply
can't keep pace with the demand.
Also in short supply are Russian
works of the '20s and '30s by authors
still out of favor with the regime, and
Russian works published abroad (tamizdat).
Western literature (in Russian) isn't
much easier to come by, and if nonfiction
is included, religious materials are by
far the hardest to find.
Andrei Sakharov (not the dissident
physicist), head of the Belles Lettres
Division of Goskomizdat (the state's
publishing arm), estimated in December
1983 that only about one-third of all
demand for books is being met. "You
would need all the printing presses of
the world," he said, "to meet the demand."
Soviet officials claim paper is scarce,
but the USSR has more timber than the
United States and Canada combined.
The real reasons.for book hunger are
political. At some high level, Garrard
noted, decisions are being made not to
publish enough of the books people want
to read, while loading bookstores with
volumes destined for the remainder tables.
The demand, after all, is well known: an
organization called Soyuzkniga evaluates
the nationwide demand for books.
At stake is a system of carefully
graduated privileges that ensures loyalty
to the regime. To satisfy the desire for
books would rob the regime of a certain
leverage it now enjoys. The challenge
for the Soviet leadership is to promote
a sliding scale of expectations, along
which it can meet the broadest literary
demands of the people and still use the
controlled distribution of books as a
reward for good behavior.
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THE TRANSFER OF POWER IN AFRICA:
THE LAST 30 YEARS
The University of Zimbabwe, in Harare,
was recently the site of a Wilson Center
conference on the transfers of power in
Africa over the past 30 years and their
consequences. Wilson Center Deputy
Director Prosser Gifford helped to design
and run the four-day meeting, which
brought together 30 historians, political
scientists, and economists from Senegal,
Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Nige-
ria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Zaire,
Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana,
and South Africa, as well as from the
United States, Great Britain, and France.
Funding came from the Carnegie Corpora-
tion and the Ford Foundation.
The scholars examined both the
events that marked the transfer of power
in their own countries and the effects of
the manner of that transfer upon subse-
quent events. Most agreed that the
transfer of political power was indeed
significant: it meant the transfer of the
opportunity to do good or ill for the
newly independent nation. The colonial
state--its apparatus and its assumptions--
constrained freedom of opportunity at the
moment of transfer, sometimes severely.
But there was, nonetheless, in almost all
cases, some room for choice.
In one crucial aspect of indepen-
dence, however, the choices were almost
universally unfortunate. The reigning
perspectives of "development theory" in
the late 1950s are as much to blame for
failed agricultural policy as the inter-
nal political exigencies of the various
African countries. For a mix of theoret-
ical and political reasons, agricultural
prices paid to producers were kept arti-
ficially low. Surpluses, created through
marketing boards or other mechanisms,
were used to build import-substitution
industries, many of which were in-
efficient. And the price of food in
urban areas was subsidized.
The long-term result: incentives for
agricultural production were drastically
reduced. This in turn discouraged farmers
from replanting crops with long-term
yields (like cocoa); encouraged smuggling
and second economies; increased the flow
of rural unemployed to city shantytowns;
and led ultimately to the use of scarce
foreign exchange for food imports.
This spiral has been disastrous for
some African countries; for others, it
has made rural desperation more prevalent
and has decreased productivity. Once
begun, the spiral is very difficult to
reverse. One corrective has been a sta-
ble currency, achieved in the franc zone
through continued close ties to the
metropolitan banking system. A better
one is to pay rural producers a fair
return. Kenya and Zimbabwe have thus far
succeeded in maintaining a strong agri-
cultural sector, and this bodes well for
both balanced growth and the generation
of internal savings for rural peasant
populations in the two countries.
The colonial state was autocratic, bu-
reaucratic, and, in the development
decade of the 1950s, increasingly inter-
ventionist economically, despite a late
patina of parliamentary institutions.
But most participants felt the propensity
of many post-colonial African regimes to
put political partisanship and personal
loyalty above any notion of service to
the nation did not necessarily derive
from their colonial inheritance.
When ethnic or ideological loyalty
becomes the standard for military or
judicial conduct, many conferees insis-
ted, a regime compromises any claim to
legitimacy among the many components of
its national population. This reality
highlighted the importance of the shape
and scope of nationalist movements
both as precursors to and inheritors
of independence.
How much of a challenge do the Pacific
Basin economies pose to the world's
current economic powers? At The Wilson
Center December 14, former fellow Harold
Jacobson, a University of Michigan polit-
ical scientist, doubted the ability of
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the post-World War II economic order to
maintain its 40-year supremacy--given
the emergence of new economic powers in
the Pacific, the shift to the geographic
balance of economic activity to Asia,
Third World demand for more influence in
international economic institutions, and
the relative decline of U.S. global
leadership.
The United States played a central
role in creating the postwar "neoliberal"
economic order (GATT, the IMF, the World
Bank, OECD) that guided the vast expan-
sion of trade and growth. Movement of
goods and services across national bor-
ders was eased as a result, and the
less-developed states benefited along
with the industrial powers. But the
system, according to Jacobson, "was de-
signed with the institutions of Europe
in mind--countries with democratic forms
of government, without active opposi-
tions, of roughly the same level of
economic development, basically market
economies."
The Pacific nations do not fit this
description. Their economic behavior
raises frequent questions: Must (or when
will) the Pacific's newly developing
economies lower their protectionist
barriers? How, with heavy involvement
by Asian governments in their national
economies, can competition for markets
be made fair? Jacobson suggested the
United States would tire of keeping its
market open if other nations did not re-
ciprocate. How long, he asked, "can the
United States tolerate a one-sided deal?"
The People's Republic of China is
the wild card in the Pacific economic
balance. Despite a new economic pragma-
tism and willingness to cooperate with
the region's capitalist nations, its
intentions remain unclear. According to
Asia Program researcher Kelly Ho, China
avoids discussing its potential role in
the Pacific Community, continues to
stress bilateralism in its economic re-
lations, and is suspicious of the Japa-
nese as the dominant economic force in
Asia. Furthermore, China balks at the
inclusion of Taiwan in a Pacific commu-
nity, although Taiwan's exports far
exceed those of the mainland.
The responsibility for shaping a
viable Pacific Basin trade system will
probably fall on the shoulders of the
United States and Japan, despite the
assertion by one participant that the
Pacific Basin Community "is an idea whose
time may not have come." Without such a
system, however, charges of protectionism
and unfair competition are sure to
persist. The United States may lack the
economic strength to play a leading role,
and Japan, despite its economic power,
has yet to gather the courage to exert
more individual leadership.
Report of a dinner-discussion sponsored
by The Wilson Center's Asia Program.
Among the participants and discussants
were Byong Hion Lew, ambassador of the
Republic of Korea to the United States,
and four members of the program's
Advisory Council: Donald K. Emmerson,
professor of political science, Univer-
sity of Wisconsin-Madison; Marius B.
Jansen, professor of history, Princeton
University; Chalmers A. Johnson, pro-
fessor of political science, University
of California, Berkeley; and Susanne H.
Rudolph, director, South Asia Language
and Area Center, University of Chicago.
At The Wilson Center December 13, William
D. Rogers, former assistant secretary of
state for Latin America, presented a
roundup of the major events affecting
U.S.-Latin American relations in 1984.
Central America and efforts to ease the
debt crisis and to further democratize
the region were at the top of his list.
He noted also that bilateral relations,
especially between the United States and
Mexico, had taken on new importance.
The year began with delivery of the
report of the "Kissinger Commission" to
the president January 4. After that,
said Rogers, who served as counsellor to
the commission, U.S. policy toward Cen-
tral America fared poorly. He attrib-
uted this partly to the failure to heed
two of the commission's basic sugges-
tions: First, multilateralize all
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