By Jerome Kuehl
COLD WAR series writer

The Russian people have always been voracious readers, but during the Cold War, what they were allowed to read was strictly controlled. Classic Russian texts (except Dostoevsky, who was thought too pessimistic) and edifying socialist-realist novels like those of Maxim Gorky ("Mother") and Mikhail Sholokhov ("And Quiet Flows the Don") were printed in huge numbers.

When Stalin died in 1953, the floodgates seemed to open. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote "The Thaw" in 1954, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn published "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" in 1962, which Khrushchev personally authorized as part of his own fight against Stalin's political legacy. But there were limits to the new freedoms; Boris Pasternak could not publish his 1957 novel, "Dr. Zhivago," in the U.S.S.R., so he allowed its unauthorized publication abroad. When he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958, Pasternak was told that he could go to Stockholm to collect his prize, but he would not be allowed back. He never made the trip.

More works were smuggled out of the country; those of Abraham Tertz (in real life Andrei Sinyavsky) and Nikolai Arzhak (Yuli Daniel) were among the earliest. When the two writers were put on trial in 1966 -- Sinyavsky for, among other things, having written "The Trial Begins" in 1960 -- and sent to labor camps, the international outcry was enormous. A few Russians too found the courage to protest (and were arrested themselves). Solzhenitsyn, who had spent eight years in labor camps after the Second World War, published "The First Circle" and "Cancer Ward" in the West in 1968 and 1969 to great acclaim. He was not sent to a labor camp this time, but in 1974, after the KGB discovered his manuscript for "The Gulag Archipelago" and he allowed its publication in the West, he was stripped of Soviet citizenship and exiled.

Writers increasingly resorted to samizdat ("self-publishing," as distinct from gosizdat, "state-publishing"). This had begun in the 1950s, when banned poetry, memoirs of Stalin's victims, and forbidden translations were first distributed as typescripts passed from hand to hand.

Not until Gorbachev came to power in 1985 were restrictions on what Russians could read gradually lifted.

The United States has never had an official censor, but this did not mean that books could not be banned during the Cold War. School boards and local libraries were keen to root out un-American beliefs and ideas, and this meant that the work of "subversive" writers like Howard Fast, Ring Lardner Jr., Dalton Trumbo and even Frank Baum, author of "The Wizard of Oz," disappeared from the shelves. The United States Information Service, whose purpose was to fly freedom's flag, refused to stock Dashiell Hammett's detective stories. But repression was never coordinated, and even when hatred and fear of the U.S.S.R. was at its most intense in the late 1940s and 1950s, books by left-wing authors could always be found somewhere. But whereas the works of Howard Fast and Dalton Trumbo were virtually unobtainable outside radical bookshops, the novels of John Le Carre, Ian Fleming and Frederick Forsyth -- spy thrillers with Cold War backgrounds in which the good guys were from the West and the bad guys from the East -- sold in the millions. Paranoid fantasies, like Richard Condon's "The Manchurian Candidate" of 1959, did well too.

Novels sympathetic to the Soviets were almost unheard of, but overtly anti-collectivist political works like George Orwell's brilliant satire "1984," written in 1948, were immensely popular. Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead," a cult work first published in 1943, was a paean of praise to those virtues of self-reliance and rugged individualism that Americans thought they possessed in abundance and that, in their eyes, the Soviet Union was devoid of.

Novels with political events in the foreground were not very popular, apart from Orwell's dystopian visions. But American left-wing writers staged their own intramural vendettas. Who had been a communist in the 1930s and 1940s, and why had he or she left the party? The playwright Lillian Hellman was blacklisted when she refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. She did so partly on the recommendation of her lover, novelist Hammett, who had been a communist in the 1930s: his best known works were "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man." The lengthy quarrel that ensued involved many prominent American liberals -- Mary McCarthy, Lionel Trilling, Dorothy Parker, Edmund Wilson, John Hersey -- who appeared in each other's score-settling novels and articles.

By the 1960s the witch hunt was pretty much over. Howard Fast's "Spartacus" was back on the shelves, and Hellman's plays were revived to packed houses.

In the 1980s, as Americans rearmed under the Reagan presidency, a series of bestsellers emphasized how crafty the Russian menace was. Martin Cruz Smith wrote "Gorky Park" in 1981. Frederick Forsyth's 1984 novel "The Fourth Protocol" was read not once but twice by Margaret Thatcher. Tom Clancy's "Hunt for Red October" was also published in 1984; it sold nearly 6 million copies and was endorsed by Ronald Reagan himself.

Paradoxically, much Western Cold War literature was not even American: Fleming, Le Carre, Forsyth and Orwell were all British. Nevil Shute, who in 1957 wrote the first of the apocalyptic nuclear war novels, "On the Beach," was an Englishman who emigrated to Australia.

In the U.S.S.R.'s client states, dissident authors -- whether they were Czechs like the novelist Milan Kundera and the playwright Vaclav Havel, or East Germans like Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym, or Poles like Czeslaw Milosz, who won the 1980 Nobel Prize -- played cat-and-mouse games with officialdom. But after Stalin's death these younger writers risked prison, house arrest or exile rather than the Gulag if they overstepped the mark. There was one prominent exception to the pattern of state harassment: the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who went to live in East Germany after the Second World War. Brecht had an Austrian passport and the regime dared not touch him.

Blood and terror in the East, fear and loathing in the West. The Cold War was an uneasy time for writers.

Jerome Kuehl is a film documentary maker specializing in television histories with credits on THE WORLD AT WAR and COLD WAR. His essay appears in "COLD WAR: An Illustrated History," the companion book to the television documentary, published by Little, Brown and Company.