5th Moscow Fair Feeds the Soviet Book Hunger

Long lines are a Soviet cliche, a feature of life, it sometimes seems, as ubiquitous and permanent as the ever-present pictures of Lenin. But the lines last week outside a glass-and-steel exhibition hall in a northern district of Moscow were something special, not only for their length, but their purpose.

There was nothing for sale here, no scarce goods like imported Czech shoes, no shiny vinyl raincoats from Finland, no Georgian cheese or sweet Vologda butter. There was only a display of books to be seen--at the 5th Moscow International Book Fair--and a sad vignette of life in a closed society.

For seven days, hundreds of Soviet citizens at a time stood patiently for hours on end outside the exhibition hall, sometimes braving a chilly autumn drizzle, for the simple privilege of looking at books. Not simply books, but Western books--from medical treatises on the pathology of the pituitary gland to modern American poetry to “Jane Fonda’s Workout Book”--books that, with rare exceptions, cannot be found in Soviet stores or libraries.

Reading With Feverish Haste

Russians came by the thousands, not so much to browse as to read with feverish haste, to scribble notes and photograph pages, sometimes even to cut whole pages out of forbidden books, or steal them if no one was looking. Some who came spent their time caressing the pages of books on Western art and photography, commenting in hushed tones on the smooth texture of the paper and the richly colored printing.

Theft is an index of popularity unique to the biennial Moscow book fair. This year the Soviets imported an American anti-shoplifting system, developed by the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co., to cut down on the losses, but it was by no means foolproof. One of the first volumes to vanish was Fonda’s illustrated exercise book, followed by a copy of the Sears Roebuck and Co. catalogue.

Like many other Westerners at the book fair, which ended Monday, Alexander Hoffman, a vice president of Doubleday Books in New York, found the scene almost inexpressibly moving, and more than a little sad.

“The hunger of these people for books is just incredible,” Hoffman, an organizer of the American Assn. of Publishers’ exhibit, said with a gesture toward the two dozen people crowded into the association’s booth and the scores waiting in line to enter. “Look at their intensity. These people are starved for information.”

“It’s just marvelous to see them sitting here, reading as fast as they can, devouring these books. Some have even cut pictures right out of the books,” he said in a conversation that was interrupted by a Russian who asked anxiously if, by any chance, there was a book on display about Walt Disney’s cartoon animation. There was.

“The worst of it comes at the end of the day,” he continued. “Some of these people have been waiting six hours just to see our exhibit. We have to close for the day and they can’t get in. I can’t bear to look at their faces.”

In most countries a book fair is a purely commercial event, a trade fair for publishers and distributors of no greater interest to the general public than a display of industrial machinery.

In the Soviet Union, however, where access to Western books of any kind is considered a privilege, not a right, the Moscow book fair is a major cultural event, something you have to see if only because your friends will claim to have done so.

Like a Celestial Event

More than just a display of forbidden literature, the book fair is like a recurrent celestial event that for a few brief days once every two years illuminates the outside world as it really exists, in all its color and diversity, beyond the distorting lens of official Soviet propaganda.

“What am I interested in? Everything. Just everything,” Leonid, a young engineer, said as he waited near the head of a 100-yard-long line outside the exhibition hall. It had taken him half an hour to buy a ticket and two hours to reach the doors of the hall. He said he would try to get into the most popular American exhibit--the 300 books displayed by the publishers’ association under the banner of “America Through America’s Eyes”--although that meant standing two or three hours more in another line.

According to official Soviet figures, 200,000 books from 102 countries were displayed in two large exhibition halls. (The country count, however, appeared to include the 15 constituent republics of the Soviet Union, each of which had its own exhibit.)

The popularity of the exhibits ranged from nil to crushing. Three bored attendants idled--lone and ignored--in the exhibit of Progress Publishers, which distributes Soviet literature and political works in foreign languages. Books like “The CIA and International Terrorism” and “Grenada: the World Against the Crimes” drew no evident interest.

On a Saturday afternoon, Vietnam’s display of more than a thousand volumes was completely empty of visitors, while hundreds of Soviet citizens waited in lines to peruse American, British, French, Israeli, Japanese and Chinese books.

A Source of Prestige

For the Soviet government, the book fair is a major opportunity to sell its own books to the West and arrange to buy large quantities of the mostly technical and academic books it seeks from abroad. The fair is also source of international prestige, a symbol of Soviet power in the literary world.

But to win the broad participation of Western publishers that makes the fair a truly international, and therefore prestigious, event, the Soviet authorities have found it necessary to relax some of the restrictions they normally impose on access to Western culture.

Israel, for example, is regularly permitted to send an exhibit to the book fair, as is the Assn. of Jewish Book Publishers in the United States.

“This is a real culture event,” said a Jewish woman who came from Kiev to see these two displays, each with about 1,300 books ranging from children’s literature to scholarly religious works.

“You must realize,” the woman said, “that this is the only contact we have with Western Jewish culture and it only happens once every two years.”

The Israeli and American Jewish exhibitors expect to sell very few books to the Soviet state. But they donate some books to the Lenin Library in Moscow and they tend to turn a blind eye to theft.

For the security police as well, shoplifting seemed of secondary interest. Standing on a mezzanine overlooking the American and Jewish exhibits, agents using both video and still cameras with long Telephoto lenses periodically filmed the lines of people waiting to enter.

This year, according to an Israeli representative, all of the more than 100 Russian-language books in the Israeli display disappeared in the first half-hour after the fair opened last week. This left only books in English and Hebrew, a disappointment to the many visitors who could read neither language. The speed with which the books vanished suggested to the Israelis that the plainclothes police agents who circulated throughout the fair, ostensibly to prevent thefts, had a hand in the disappearance.

Censorship Evident

While the usual cultural barriers are lowered for the book fair, they are not abandoned. Censorship invariably rears its head. The response of Western publishers and distributors ranged from outrage to bland compliance.

The British Council, an organization of British publishers, stood at the outraged end of the spectrum. A roving committee of Soviet censors seized 10 of 19,000 British books, mostly for arcane ideological reasons.

Four of the books, ironically, were published by left-wing firms in Britain. One--a record of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956--was pulled from the display, the censors said, because it contained a reference to Alexander Dubcek, the liberal Czech leader who was deposed by the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

“Obviously 10 out of 19,000 isn’t very many but we have vigorously protested each of the seizures as a matter of principle,” Anthony Read of the British Publisher’s Assn. said.

“We are here to do business and we certainly are not going to bring in a lot of provocative literature. We think we must be here if it is at all possible--look at the crowds and see the impact this fair has on them--but we want to be here under terms that are acceptable.”

A Different Opinion

A different point of view was expressed by Baker and Taylor, a large American wholesaler that recently won a contract to supply Chinese libraries with selected American books. Now, as one sales representative put it, the firm wants to “take a crack at another closed society.”

Soviet customs seized a number of Baker and Taylor’s books, but the firm did not protest, said J. Wendell Lotz, the director of market planning. He explained that there was no reason for concern because the Soviets promised to give the books back at the end of the fair.

“Sure, we know censorship exists here. But we’re here to do business and we’ve made very significant strides,” Lotz said.

Asked why many of the shelves in its exhibit were empty two days before the fair ended on Monday, another Baker and Taylor representative said the Soviet book-buying agency, Mezhkniga, had bought the entire display and was already carting the books away.

“It’s true the public won’t get to see these books,” he said. “But the Soviets paid for them, so what can we do?”

Other exhibitors refused to release their books to Mezhkniga until the fair ended.

Controversy of another kind surrounded the most popular American exhibit, the display of 300 books sponsored by the Assn. of American Book Publishers. Under a $50,000 grant from the government-sponsored National Endowment for Democracy, the association set up a committee headed by novelist Kurt Vonnegut to select 300 recently published books that would represent the breadth and diversity of American tastes, social concerns and political debate.

Unbalanced Selection

The national endowment, however, complained that the committee’s selection was far from balanced, with an undue emphasis on what was wrong with America--from acid rain and poverty to the Republican Party’s foreign policy--and that it lacked any countervailing representation from the conservative end of the spectrum.

Hoffman, the Doubleday vice president, said the publisher’s association ended the dispute by returning the national endowment’s $50,000. Vonnegut, nevertheless, resigned from the committee in protest, although the association made no changes in its selection.

Hoffman said the lack of a single book with a conservative outlook was “regrettable.” But he explained that “we were determined not to second-guess our committee. It would be unfortunate, and ironic, if we came to the Soviet Union under a cloud of censorship.”

Few Soviet citizens seemed aware of the controversy and fewer seemed to care. The political books that sparked the dispute, such as Jonathan Schell’s “The Fate of the Earth” and “The Fallacy of Star Wars” by the Union of Concerned Scientists, proved least interesting to Russians, who much preferred to pore over volumes like “Stars!,” a Hollywood album, and “The Kitchen: 100 Design Solutions.”

Indeed, the most popular souvenirs of the 5th International Moscow Book Fair were the 50,000 free copies of the exhibit’s Russian-English catalogue of the “America Through America’s Eyes” exhibit, describing the 300 books on display.