Chapter 13, "Hot Books in the the Cold War, " from , "Cultural Exchange and the Cold War, By Yale Richmond, Penn State Press, 2003 says that starting in '56, two employees of Radio Liberty, Isaac Patch and Betty Carter, distributed over a million copies of books such as Animal Farm, Nabokov's, "Pnin, " Joyce's, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, " to the, "Iron Curtain." CIA's initial grant was 10K, eventually a million $ a yr.
--- I like the implicit arrogance of this action, as if Eastern Europeans were unable to draw their own conclusions and had to be enlightened about their own countries by books written by foreigners. "Heck, I never knew I lived in a police state. Thank God this book by Orwell made it into the country to open my eyes!" Given the chronic toilet paper shortages, I think I can guess what happened to most of these books. :)
I do feel sorry for whoever had to translate Joyce. Although, given that Heidegger has been translated into Russian, which has no present-tense form of the verb "to be," I guess anything's possible.
As an aside, the reason for the "red-brown" vogue in Russia in the 90s, insofar as it existed anywhere outside of the minds of Western naifs, is that none of the right-wing European writers had ever been published in the Soviet Union, for obvious reasons. Nobody had ever read Evola or Schmidt. It was very exciting for a lot of intellectuals. Dugin capitalized on it very astutely. BTW, I caught Dugin on TV the other day; that guy is _big_. He's very pro-Putin (and a fan of Tatu, believe it or not).