The East Was Read: Socialist Culture in the Third World

by Vijay Prashad (Editor), Deepa Bhasthi, Maria Berrios

Across the Third World, people grew up reading inexpensive, beautifully-produced books from the Soviet Union – children’s books, classics of world literature, books on science and mathematics, and works of Marxist theory. The first half of The East Was Read is an homage to the lost world Soviet books. Wang Chaohua and Pankaj Mishra recall with fondness the meaning of these books for their very different lives in China and in India respectively. Deepa Bhasthi goes on an emotional journey into the library of her grandfather, a communist intellectual. Rossen Djagalov writes a short history of Progress Publishers. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o talks about how he wrote Petals of Blood in Yalta on the sidelines of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association in 1973. Sumayya Kassamali writes about Faiz in Beirut, giving us a sense of the cultural worlds that drew in both the Soviet Union and the Third World Project.

Genres: History, Politics, Race, India, Nonfiction

153 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2019

About the author

Vijay Prashad is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Darker Nations: A Biography of the Short-Lived Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. His most recent book is Red Star Over the Third World. He writes regularly for Frontline, The Hindu, Alternet and BirGun.

Reviews

[Appu · Rating 3 out of 5]

History ended in 1991. The world has become monochromatic. But in the 1980s when I was growing up, it was different. An alternative was available. The Soviet Union loomed large and it spread its soft power through cheap but high-quality books, periodicals, and textbooks. These reached even the smallest towns of India, as they did elsewhere in the 3rd world. The newsweekly Soviet Union was a favorite, not to read of course, I was too young, but its glossy pages made for good book covering material. There was Sputnik, a rival to the Readers Digest. I can still recall neatly stacked copies of Sputnik, proudly displaying their spines, on an elder cousin’s bookshelf. For most of the 80s kids, their first ‘extra reading’ was Soviet illustrated books. Volumes like Chuck and Gek (Arkady Gaidar), Father’s Boyhood (Alexander Raskin) and Visiting Grandpa’s House (Nikolay Nosov) were much loved, so much so that in Kerala today these are reprinted and still much in demand. Then there was Marxist literature. Even if you did not read them, you could use them as decorations. Even my father’s library, which consisted mostly of paperbacks of American bestsellers, contained a couple of volumes of Marx and Engels and a short biography of Marx.
I have lost most of my Soviet era books, but I still have a volume of Tolstoy (“Lev”, not Leo mind you) from that era as a keepsake. This is “The Tales of Sevastopol and The Cossacks” published by Raduga Publishers, Moscow. (First published in 1982, reprinted in 1989). It is of course, hardbound with a flap jacket and lavishly illustrated. The small sticker inside the book reminds me that I bought it from the People Publishing House (PPH) outlet in JNU in the early 2000s when the Soviet Union was dead for a decade. I only paid Rs.55 for it.
After breathlessly reading through the essays in this volume, all dealing with aspects of Soviet soft power in the Third World, all I could say was “Thanks for the memories”.

[Rita · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is about how people from various countries, such as China and India, got hold of books from the Soviet Union. It is written by various different people. Therefore, the writing style and tone quite frequently change. It consisted of a lot of name dropping.

I can imagine to people with similiar experiences, that book may evoke feelings of nostalgia. Some book titles and movies I earmarked. But apart from that, the book did not do much for me.

Facts I have learnt from this book:
- The British government in India held grand celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the rule of the Queen Emperor Victoria. At the same time, Indian people struggled through the famine of 1896-97. p.7

- "In 1977, General Zia ul-Haq deposed Pakistan's elcted prime minister, Zulfiker Ali Bhutto, in a coup that would lead to over a decade of American-supported military rule." p.39

- "In 1966, readers in many parts of the world were rocked by explosive revealtions that key literary journals - including the London-based Encounter, the Beirut-based Hiwar, the Kampala-based Transition and the Bombay-based Quest - had been covertly funed by the US Central Intelligence Agency through an anti-Communist front group: The Congress for Cultural Freedom." p.42

[Tanroop · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was taken aback by just how personal and moving some of these essays were. A great read.

[Rob M · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short but delightful compilation of essays by Third World intellectuals on the impact Soviet books had on their political imaginations. The East Was Read contains several essays which are deeply personal and humane, and a few which are important academic documents, particularly the studies of Moscow's Progress publishing house and of Cuban revolutionary cinema. I smashed through this in only a couple of days and enjoyed every moment of it. There is clearly a *lot* more to be written on this subject, and this book is barely a teaser.

[Mark Surya]

Picked this one up for two reasons: 1) I was a big fan of Prashad's Red Star Over the Third World, in my personal opinion Prashad's most beautiful book, and 2) that even my father, who at his best was a fascinatingly liberal Hindu and was, near the end of his life, increasingly Hindutva, regressive, Brahminical and bigoted, always spoke with fascination, nostalgia, and admiration for the Soviet books he read as a youth in Andhra Pradesh that allowed him an actual entry into a broader world of culture and literacy than he would have had access to otherwise. In one of the essays of this book the author writes about running a blog about these publications and receiving emails from people desperate to purchase parts or all of her collection. There is almost no doubt in my mind that my father would have been one of them; and so at the very least I read this to understand why an old Tamil man would possibly think a good movie night for his 10 & 12 year old children was to go to the arthouse cinema and watch "Goodbye, Lenin" on opening week. Ah.

Considering, then, the editor and the publishing house, the book is more diverse, politically, than one might except. No one, of course, from the Right, but by and large these essayists are remarkably conflicted over the legacy of the USSR and Communist soft power in the 20th century. Conflicted, meaning not unappreciative. This book is *not* the book of theory that one might expect/hope from the title, but is indeed what the backmatter suggests---a book for people who love books, readers, appreciate what literature can do and achieve, its relevance, its power. It's lovely in that way, but not quite the sequel I wanted. Curse the bias of my expectations, anyway. Actually, the book might make lovely reading for anyone interested in "craft" books on writing---amongst the most interesting assertions made in this text is that the rise in literary production in the US/it's centrality, including the now infamous CIA molding of the MFA program, was in a sense largely due to the longstanding Soviet supremacy in this field for a long time. Wild stuff.

[Ajay S · Rating 5 out of 5]

a diverse array of personal essays and memoirs on the impact of socialist culture, through literature and cinema, on the the global south. not every author in this collection was particularly sympathetic, but many were, to the Soviet Union but it helped paint a full picture of how important these books were even outside socialist circles. my favorite two pieces were My Thamnaiah, His Soviet Books, and the Time to Read and Socialist Cinema to the Rescue. i really liked this passage from the later:

Socialist cinema made me uncomfortable. It made me think. It made me question my place in the world. It made me want to understand the world. It shone light on dark corners. It made me want to do something. Mainstream Hindi Cinema, on the other hand, was placebo. It showed an unjust world, to be sure, but it assured me I had nothing to do with either making it unjust, or in righting the wrongs. The villain, always alluring in his badness, always beyond pale, never someone I could see or meet in real life, and, whether uncouth or sophisticated, was seductive and evil. He was responsible for the world's ills. The hero's fists clasped my anger. The grander the villain, the mightier the hero. The moral universe of the films was unrelated to structures of oppression. By getting rid of the immoral villain, the hero absolved me of any action.

this book was quite complementary to my recent trip to India. it was never too hard find socialist books even today, with progress publishers gone, at any of the bookstores i visited. i was shocked when my parents, who are no socialists, said they knew Mother by Maxim Gorky as of the great classics and were excited to read it when i gave them a copy for christmas. i actually saw Mother a number times, even translated into smaller local languages, in India when i couldn't find a copy in person back in the US for the life of me. The East is Read helped me fill in the pieces for these little puzzles.

Anyone interested in books, culture, and socialism should definitely give this a read!

[Liam Tobiason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful collection of inspiring and nostalgic stories

[Burat · Rating 5 out of 5]

awesome, nostalgic, fun. I added many things to my list as a result of reading these essays