Very Different Customs

Soviet blacklisters shelve American publishers 'plans

Last week, the day before Moscow's second International Book Fair, Boris Stukalin, chairman of the Soviet state publishing committee, proclaimed that the fair offered "fresh evidence of the . . . implementation of the Helsinki accords ... and the Soviet Union's constant efforts to deepen mutual understanding..."

So much for the dust jacket. Inside the fair was another story. There Western publishers dreamed of reaching millions of new readers with millions of old rubles. Said Robert Baensch, vice president of Harper & Row: "We're planting the seeds, looking for a big future market." But as fast as the seeds were planted, they were uprooted. Robert Bernstein, chairman of Random House and an outspoken advocate of human rights, was not even allowed in the country. And at the fair itself, inspectors ransacked exhibitions and carted off more than 50 books, most of them American. Some of the proscribed works had been put there as a challenge; no one was surprised at the confiscation of Animal Farm, George Orwell's savage parody of the Revolution, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn's three Gulags. But other excisions were mystifying. From the booth of the Association of Jewish Book Publishers, for example, inspectors confiscated a book of essays entitled The Holocaust Years, as well as ex-Israeli Ambassador Abba Eban's My Country. Among the 300 volumes left untouched were Eban's companion volume My People and Lucy Dawidowicz's volume The War Against the Jews, an analysis of the Holocaust.

Other forbidden works included The Arts of David Levine, with a caricature of Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev. When it was shown that Levine also lampooned American politicians, Ramaz Mchelidze, deputy general director of the fair, observed without irony, "We have different customs." Publishers may profit from the difference -- which might explain their unwillingness, despite loud harrumphs, to pull out of the fair. In the '40s, getting a book banned in Boston was tantamount to a free ride on the bestseller list. Being maligned in Moscow may provide an equally large audience.

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