Confiscated (Russia & Prussia)
Moscow, winter 1958/1959
When Russia entered his living room, Prussia was sitting on Russia's couch, boots on the upholstery. (Russia knew his boss expected him to call Prussia the German Democratic Republic or GDR now, but he had known Prussia for centuries and old habits died hard. Besides, Пруссия was easier for him to pronounce.)
What struck Russia as odd wasn't Prussia's pastime activity in itself—Prussia was much more of an avid reader than he let on; Russia knew that at least since the time in the eighteenth century when they had both striven to become more cultured—but the fact that Prussia was reading in Russian. Prussia usually preferred books in his native German.
"Show me that book," Russia ordered.
"Later," Prussia replied distractedly. "I'm reading."
The room temperature seemed to drop when Russia's purple aura started to glow.
"All right, all right," Prussia sighed and held the cover in a way so that Russia could see the title. "There. Can I read on now?"
Instead of a reply, Russia yanked the book out of Prussia's hands. "Do you really believe I don't know that Dr Zhivago is anti-socialist propaganda and discredits the Revolution?" he said grimly. "This book is confiscated! Confiscated!" Russia repeated and stomped out of the room.
"But I wanted to know if Yuri and Lara meet again after the Revolution!" Prussia pouted.
Russia knew he was actually expected to report Prussia to the KGB in cases of disobedience, but… But that novel! He loved literature, and how he had longed to read the melancholic love story between Yuri Zhivago and Lara Guichard since it got first published in Italian! There was no way he could allow the KGB to actually confiscate that book.
Well, Russia thought to himself while he hid Dr Zhivago in the gap between his mattress and the bed frame, whosoever of my enemies bootlegged that novel actually did me a favour.
Somewhere across the Pacific Ocean, America sneezed.
Notes
Just a wee bit of clarification: Russia and Prussia (Пруссия is "Prussia" in Cyrillic) have a long history together, which is apparently often overlooked by the majority of the Hetalia fandom. I don't ship those two romantically, but I see them as former allies, ex-rivals and sort-of-buddies (in the 18th/19th centuries, in particular) who went through tough times (in the 20th century, in particular). In any case, Prussia must be far less afraid of Russia than most people in the fandom seem to believe.
The story behind this chapter: Russian writer Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (Борис Леонидович Пастернак, 1890-1960) gave the manuscript of his now-famous novel Dr Zhivago (Доктор Живаго) to an Italian Marxist publisher in 1956. Pasternak had no hope his book would get published in the Soviet Union because it didn't conform to Soviet cultural policy and didn't show the Russian Revolution of 1917 in a good light. The publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (1926-1972), actually released an Italian version of Dr Zhivago in 1957.
Apparently, the CIA then managed to get photographs of the manuscript, and it bootlegged copies of the original Russian version in the Vatican pavilion during the Expo 58 world fair in Brussels. Journalists Peter Finn and Petra Couvée tell this story in The Zhivago Affair (2014), using declassified CIA documents. You can read a bit more about their book in the article "The Zhivago Affair review – how a novel became a weapon in the cold war" by Christopher Bray in The Guardian (06.07.2014). Prussia (who used to be—or still is?—the Teutonic Order, after all) might have retained some ties to the Vatican and/or Catholics at Russia's place and, because of that, might have laid his hands on a copy of Dr Zhivago in Russian. I think both Prussia and Russia secretly have a soft spot for melancholic love stories, but never cared much whether political allusions in those stories supported or didn't support post-revolutionary Russia…