by DARIEN CAVANAUGH

During the Cold War, Moscow’s Ministry of Culture was a master of censorship. The Kremlin’s cultural bulwark screened non-Russian films, suppressed literature and shaped the lives of Soviet artists.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency also dabbled in the dark arts of cultural influence. Except it preferred the carrot to the stick.

Words matter. A society’s books and movies impact the world. Books, in particular were often internationally influential during the Cold War. Both the ministry and the agency understood this.

The CIA funded the production and distribution of individual literary projects. It made sure Russian-language copies of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago flooded into the Soviet Union. Further, the agency directed more comprehensive operations.

Eric Bennett, a professor of English at Providence College and author of the forthcoming Workshops of Empire — Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War, wrote that the CIA’s efforts produced lasting and potentially damaging effects.

According to Bennett, the CIA and other conservative organizations actually infiltrated the United States’ leading writing programs and literary journals. The goal was to establish an American literary tradition that would “venerate and fortify the particular, the individual, the situated, the embedded, the irreducible.”

That literary voice would be an alternative to the Soviet Union’s socialist realism — and its selfless heroes sacrificing themselves for good of the revolution.

Soon after Pres. Harry Truman founded the CIA with the National Security Act of 1947, the agency began focusing on the arts.

One of its first literary projects involved George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The book had been already been published, but the agency decided it was ready for the big screen. They just needed someone to write the screenplay — and to write it the way the CIA wanted.

In 1950, CIA agent Carleton Alsop — who was working undercover at Paramount Studios — approached George Orwell’s widow to secure the rights for a film adaptation of Animal Farm.

The agency was a big fan of the book’s anti-communist message. But they weren’t so crazy about the ending.

In Orwell’s version, when the pigs overthrow their human oppressors, they form an alliance with the humans instead of ushering in an egalitarian utopia. Pigs and humans sit down at the dinner table in farmhouse, toasting each other as the rest of the farm animals watch from outside.

In the book, the ending is a critique of communism and capitalism, suggesting that the two in many ways are one and the same. But in the film, the CIA changed the ending to leave out the human capitalists and portray the farm animals attacking only their communist pig oppressors.

There is one brief moment in the movie when Benjamin the donkey hallucinates and sees Napoleon the pig as having a human face. Other than that, “when the barnyard animals attack the new ruling class,” Michael Rogin noted in The Nation, “capitalist exploiters are as invisible on the screen as was the CIA behind the camera.”

Animal Farm opened in theaters in 1954, did well at the box office and received critical praise. Co-directors John Halas and Joy Batchelor were unaware of the CIA’s influence on screenplay’s adaptation until the 1980s.