The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and a Forbidden Book

by Peter Finn

  Yevtushenko read Doctor Zhivago a short time later and was “disappointed.” He said the young writers of the post-Stalin period were attracted by the masculine prose of Hemingway, and the work of writers such as J. D. Salinger and Erich Maria Remarque. Doctor Zhivago, in comparison, seemed old-fashioned, even a little boring, the work of an earlier generation. He didn’t finish reading it.

  The September deadline for a Soviet edition passed, and officials in Moscow were becoming desperate. Soviet trade representatives in Paris and London attempted without success to get the publishers Gallimard and Harvill Press to return the manuscript. The Soviet embassy in London also insisted that, if publication was inevitable, Harvill Press ought to include an introduction stating that Pasternak himself had not wished his book to be published. The Foreign Office, which discouraged Harvill Press from sending a copy of the English translation to Pasternak for his corrections, suggested that instead of a note about Pasternak’s purported objections, the publishers simply say, “Banned in the Soviet Union.” “That might only be of advantage from the propaganda point of view but would perhaps serve as a slight protection to Pasternak himself,” wrote Philip de Zulueta, the Foreign Office representative at No. 10 Downing Street. The remark may have been somewhat facetious, as it’s unclear how noting that the book was banned would help Pasternak, although it would certainly boost sales.

  Pietro Zveteremich was in Moscow in October and found that “the atmosphere created around the book” was “very ugly.” Almost as soon as he arrived in the city, as part of an Italian delegation hosted by the Union of Soviet Writers, Zveteremich was told that publication of Doctor Zhivago would be an affront to both Pasternak and the Soviet Union. Zveteremich was handed a typewritten letter purportedly signed by Pasternak; it repeated some of what was in the February telegram and complained that Feltrinelli never replied. In a meeting with officials from the writers’ union, Zveteremich said publication of Doctor Zhivago could not be stopped. “A brawl, I can truly say, broke out,” he recalled. Pasternak felt it unsafe to meet with the translator, but Zveteremich was able to see Ivinskaya, who gave him a note from Pasternak for Feltrinelli, and it reflected the author’s true sentiments. In a letter to Feltrinelli, Zveteremich wrote that “P. asks you not to pay any heed to this and cannot wait for the book to come out even though they have threatened to reduce him to starvation.” Zveteremich’s experience in Moscow led him to leave the Communist Party. “I became convinced that there was no socialism in the USSR, but rather just Asian theocratic despotism,” he later wrote. In his short note to Feltrinelli, Pasternak wrote, “Forgive me for the injustices that have befallen you and for those perhaps yet to come caused by my wretched faith. May our distant future, the faith that helps me live, protect you.”

  Feltrinelli replied to Pasternak’s telegram on October 10. The letter, although addressed to Pasternak, was clearly written for Soviet officialdom and was designed to protect Pasternak by shifting blame away from the author and onto the publisher. Feltrinelli began by saying that he saw none of the shortcomings described in the telegram: that the work was unfinished and needed thorough revision. Feltrinelli reminded his readers that he had agreed to delay publication until September and there was nothing now standing in the way of publication.

  And he pretended to lecture his obstreperous author. “In order to avoid any further tension in Western literary circles, created as a result of your wholly regrettable telegram … we advise you to make no further attempts to hold up publication of the book, something that, far from preventing it, would lend the entire affair a tone of political scandal that we have never sought nor wish to create.”

  Surkov traveled to Italy in October as part of a Soviet delegation of poets, but his real mission was to confront Feltrinelli. With a translator in tow, he stormed into the publisher’s offices on Via Andegari. His bellowing in Russian could be heard down on the street. Surkov, much like Alicata, waved Pasternak’s telegram in the publisher’s face. “I know how such letters are written,” said Feltrinelli, a photo of Pasternak hanging on the wall over his shoulder. Surkov pressed his case for three hours, but left with nothing. Feltrinelli said he was a “free publisher in a free country,” and he told Surkov that by publishing the novel he was paying tribute to a great narrative work of Soviet literature. The work was a testament to the truth, he said, even if the cultural bureaucrats in Moscow didn’t get it. After the meeting, Feltrinelli said seeing Surkov was like encountering “a hyena dipped in syrup.”

  Surkov was not ready to quit, and he introduced the most menacing note to date in the affair. He gave an interview to L’Unità, the Communist party newspaper for which Feltrinelli had acted as a stringer eleven years earlier. In the first public comments by a Soviet official on Doctor Zhivago, he said he offered the facts, “in all sincerity”: Pasternak’s novel was rejected by his comrades because it cast doubt on the validity of the October Revolution. Pasternak accepted these criticisms and asked for the manuscript to be returned by his Italian publisher so he could revise it. But despite all this, the novel, according to press reports, will appear in Italy against the will of its author.

  “The Cold War is beginning to involve literature,” intoned Surkov. “If this is freedom seen through Western eyes, well, I must say we have a different view of it.” The reporter noted that he spoke “to make clear how terrible he felt all of this was.” Surkov continued: “Thus it is for the second time, for the second time in our literary history, after Mahogany by Boris Pilnyak, a book by a Russian will be first published abroad.”

  The invocation of Pilnyak, Pasternak’s executed neighbor, was a direct threat. Surkov was comfortable with the exigencies of state violence. The previous year he told a Yugoslav newspaper, “I have seen my friends, writers, disappear before my eyes but at the time I believed it necessary, demanded by the Revolution.” Feltrinelli told Kurt Wolff, Pasternak’s American publisher, that Surkov’s words should be quoted as widely as possible and “Time and Newsweek should get on the move.”

  At the end of October, Pasternak was compelled to send one more message to Feltrinelli. He told him he was “stunned” at Feltrinelli’s failure to reply to his telegram, and said that “decency demands that you respect the wishes of an author.”

  With publication imminent, Pasternak followed up the final October 25 telegram with a private note to Feltrinelli. It was dated November 2:

  Dear Sir,

  I can find no words with which to express my gratitude. The future will reward us, you and me, for the vile humiliations, we have suffered. Oh, how happy I am that neither you, nor Gallimard, nor Collins have been fooled by those idiotic and brutal appeals accompanied by my signature (!), a signature all but false and counterfeit, insofar as it was extorted from me by a blend of fraud and violence. The unheard-of arrogance to wax indignant over the “violence” employed by you against my “literary freedom,” when exactly the same violence was being used against me, covertly. And that this vandalism should be disguised as concern for me, for the sacred rights of the artist! But we shall soon have an Italian Zhivago, French, English and German Zhivagos—and one day perhaps a geographically distant but Russian Zhivago! And this is a great deal, a very great deal, so let’s do our best and what will be will be.

  The first edition of Doctor Zhivago in translation in Italian was printed on November 15, 1957, followed by a second run of three thousand copies five days later. The novel appeared in bookstores on November 23 following its launch the previous evening at the Hotel Continental in Milan. The book was an immediate best seller.

  One of the first reviews appeared in the Corriere della Sera under the headline “You look for a political libel and find a work of art.” “Pasternak does not require any political judgments from us, the first readers of his novel in the West,” the review concluded. “Perhaps in the loneliness of his village, the old writer wants to know whether we heard his poetic voice in the story, whether we found proof of his artistic beliefs. And the
answer is: yes, we did.”

  The novel had begun a long journey. But to get back home to Russia, Zhivago would have a secret ally.

  Chapter 8

  “We tore a big hole in the Iron Curtain.”

  The Russian-language manuscript of Doctor Zhivago arrived at CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., in early January 1958 in the form of two rolls of film. British intelligence provided this copy of the novel. Inside the agency, the novel was the source of some excitement. In a memo to Frank Wisner, who oversaw clandestine operations for the CIA, the head of the agency’s Soviet Russia Division described Doctor Zhivago as “the most heretical literary work by a Soviet author since Stalin’s death.”

  “Pasternak’s humanistic message—that every person is entitled to a private life and deserves respect as a human being, irrespective of the extent of his political loyalty or contribution to the state—poses a fundamental challenge to the Soviet ethic of sacrifice of the individual to the Communist system,” wrote John Maury, the Soviet Russia Division chief. “There is no call to revolt against the regime in the novel, but the heresy which Dr. Zhivago preaches—political passivity—is fundamental. Pasternak suggests that the small unimportant people who remain passive to the regime’s demands for active participation and emotional involvement in official campaigns are superior to the political ‘activists’ favored by the system. Further, he dares hint that society might function better without these fanatics.”

  Maury was a fluent Russian speaker who had been an assistant naval attaché in Moscow when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. During the war, he served in Murmansk as part of the Lend-Lease program by which the United States delivered over $11 billion worth of supplies to the Soviet Union. Maury, however, had no affection for the former ally. He subscribed to the belief that Soviet action could best be understood through the prism of Russian history. “He considered the Soviet regime a continuation of imperial Russia, and thought the KGB had been founded by Ivan the Terrible,” said one of his officers.

  The CIA’s Soviet Russia Division was stocked with first- and second-generation Russian-Americans whose families, in many cases, had fled the Bolsheviks. The division prided itself on its vodka-soaked parties with a lot of Russian singing. “Our specialty was the charochka, the ceremonial drinking song with its chorus of pey do dna [bottoms up!],” recalled one officer who served in the 1950s.

  The American and British intelligence services agreed that Doctor Zhivago should be published in Russian, but the British “asked that it not be done in the U.S.” This approach became policy for the CIA, which calculated that a Russian-language edition produced in the United States would be more easily dismissed by the Soviet Union as propaganda in a way that publication in a small European country would not. Moreover, they feared, overt American involvement could be used by the authorities in Moscow to persecute Pasternak.

  In an internal memo shortly after the appearance of the novel in Italy, agency staff also recommended that Doctor Zhivago “should be published in a maximum number of foreign editions, for maximum free world distribution and acclaim and consideration for such honor as the Nobel prize.” While the CIA hoped Pasternak’s novel would draw global attention, including from the Swedish Academy, there was no indication that the agency considered printing a Russian-language edition to help Pasternak win the prize.

  The CIA’s role in operations involving Doctor Zhivago was backed at the highest level of government. The Eisenhower White House, through its Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), which oversaw covert activities, gave the CIA exclusive control over the novel’s “exploitation.” The rationale behind this decision was “the sensitivity of the operation, and that the hand of the United States government should not be shown in any manner.” Instead of having the State Department or the United States Information Agency trumpet the novel publicly, secrecy was employed to prevent “the possibility of personal reprisal against Pasternak or his family.” The OCB issued verbal guidelines to the agency and told the CIA to promote the book “as literature, not as cold-war propaganda.”

  The CIA, as it happened, loved literature—novels, short stories, poems. Joyce, Hemingway, Eliot. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov. Books were weapons. If a piece of literature was unavailable or banned in the USSR or Eastern Europe, and the work might challenge or contrast with Soviet reality, the agency wanted it in the hands of citizens in the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War was twelve years old in 1958, and whatever illusions might have existed about liberating the “captive peoples” of the East were shattered by the bloodshed in Budapest and the inability of the Western powers, and in particular of the United States, to do much more than peer through the barbed wire. The United States was unable to help the striking East Germans in 1953 or the Poles who also revolted in 1956. Communism would not be rolled back for the simple reason that no one could countenance an intervention that could escalate into war between superpowers armed with atomic weapons.

  In the 1950s, the CIA was engaged in relentless global political warfare with the Kremlin. This effort was intended to shore up support for the Atlantic Alliance (NATO) in Western Europe, counter Soviet propaganda, and challenge Soviet influence in the world. The CIA believed the power of ideas—in news, art, music, and literature—could slowly corrode the authority of the Soviet state with its own people and in the satellite states of Eastern Europe. The agency was in a long game. Cord Meyer, the head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division, which oversaw much of the agency’s covert propaganda operations, wrote that exposure to Western ideas “could incrementally over time improve the chances for gradual change toward more open societies.”

  To further its objectives, the CIA, using a host of front organizations and phony foundations, spent untold millions to fund concert tours, art exhibitions, highbrow magazines, academic research, student activism, news organizations—and book publishing. In Western Europe, the CIA channeled money to the non-Communist left, which it regarded as the principal bulwark against its Communist foe. The alliance between Cold War anticommunism and liberal idealism “appeared natural and right” and would not break down until the 1960s. “Our help went mainly to the democratic parties of the left and of the center,” said Meyer. “The right wing and the conservative forces had their own financial resources: the real competition with the communists for votes and influence lay on the left of the political spectrum, where the allegiance of the working class and the intelligentsia was to be decided.”

  In 1950s America, during and long after the poisonous anti-Communist crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy, it would have been impossible to get Congress to appropriate money for the State Department or any other part of the government to openly fund left-wing organizations and the promotion of the arts in Europe. Even for direct operations against the Communist Bloc, Congress would have struggled to support activities as seemingly effete as book publishing. The CIA budget was black, and perfect for the job. The agency believed with genuine fervor that the Cold War was also cultural. There was a realization that this funding—millions of dollars annually—would support activities that would “manifest diversity and differences of view and be infused by the concept of free inquiry. Thus views expressed by representatives and members of the U.S. supported organizations in many cases were not shared by their sponsors.… It took a fairly sophisticated point of view to understand that the public exhibition of unorthodox views was a potent weapon against monolithic Communist uniformity of action.” Thus the CIA “became one of the world’s largest grant-making institutions,” rivaling the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations.

  President Harry Truman didn’t like the idea of a peacetime American intelligence service. Newspapers and some congressmen worried aloud about an American gestapo. And immediately after World War II, a part of the establishment felt queasy about putting down a stake in the underworld of covert operations. But as tensions with the Soviet Union grew, the need for some “centralized snooping,” as Truman called it, seemed unavoi
dable. The CIA was created in 1947, and, as well as authorizing intelligence gathering, Congress vested the spy agency with power to perform “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” This vague authority would provide the legal justification for covert action, operations that cannot be traced to the CIA and can be denied by the U.S. government, although at first the CIA’s general counsel was uncertain if the agency could undertake “black propaganda” without specific congressional authorization. In the first years of the Cold War, various government departments, including State and Defense, continued to debate how to institute a permanent and effective capability to run missions, which ranged from propaganda efforts to paramilitary operations such as arming émigré groups and inserting them back inside the Eastern Bloc to commit acts of sabotage.

  The intellectual author of U.S. covert action was George Kennan, the influential diplomat and policy planner, who argued that the United States had to mobilize all its resources and cunning to contain the Soviet Union’s atavistic expansionism. The United States was also facing a foe that, since the 1920s, had mastered the creation of the front organization—idealistic-sounding, international entities that promoted noncommunist ideas such as peace and democracy but were secretly controlled by the Kremlin and its surrogates. Washington needed a capability to “do things that very much needed to be done, but for which the government couldn’t take official responsibility.” In May 1948, the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, which Kennan headed, wrote a memo entitled “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare.” The memo noted that “the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare was the most refined and effective of any in history” and argued that the United States, in response, “cannot afford to leave unmobilized our resources for covert political warfare.” It laid down a series of recommendations to support and cultivate resistance within the Soviet Bloc and support the Soviet Union’s émigré and ideological foes in the West.