Beyond Propaganda: How Soviet Book Publishing and Translation Operations in the Third World Functioned as Development Aid

It is not hard to see why the Soviet Union’s Cold War-era book translation and publication activities are often cast as propaganda enterprises. After all, the mission of the state-run Foreign Languages Publishing House (FLPH), which was at the helm of Soviet global literary outreach, was “to publish works that would serve to strengthen the Marxist-Leninist education of the masses abroad, to fight against bourgeois ideology and to expose the lies and the slander of the imperialist movement.” But a close study of this organization’s operational and editorial practices reveals that propagandizing socialism often took a back seat to supplying Third World readers with aid in the form of books: books that recipients themselves desired and requested, not those that the FLPH necessarily wanted to publish.

Drawing on new archival evidence, this paper argues that both the FLPH (renamed Progress in 1963) and the USSR’s book distribution and export agency played critical economic, social, and technical-scientific development roles in post-colonial Asia and Africa. Beginning in the mid 1950s and continuing on through 1991, resource-strapped students, schools, libraries, colleges, ministries and even military institutions from across the Third World turned to the FLPH for assistance. Against an optimistic backdrop of rising literacy rates and educational and employment opportunities, but also in the face of harsher post-colonial realities — low incomes, paper shortages, and limited capacities for domestic book production — they asked the FLPH to send them free or heavily subsidized books. Not only did the publisher comply with this cascade of requests, but it also adapted its editorial schedules to fulfill the high demand for particular genres, including Soviet medical, science and engineering textbooks and illustrated children’s literature. By focusing on the relationship between FLPH and its readers, I take the study of Soviet development politics in a new direction.