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

by Peter Finn

  “I felt the book needed to be published,” de Ridder said. He also thought he could get away with it. He calculated that a contract with Feltrinelli was about to be signed, and this was simply an early and lucrative sale that would draw no attention.

  In the first week of September, the first Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago rolled off the printing press, bound in Mouton’s signature blue-linen cover. The title page acknowledged the copyright of Feltrinelli with the words in Cyrillic, “G. Feltrinelli—Milan 1958.” The name Feltrinelli, however, was not correctly transcribed in Russian, missing the soft sign after the l and before the t. The copyright note was de Ridder’s last-minute decision, after a small number of early copies were printed without any acknowledgment of the Italian publisher. The use of Pasternak’s full name, including the patronymic Leonidovich on the title page, also suggested that the book had been prepared by a non-native speaker; Russians would not use the patronymic on a title page. The book also had a short, unsigned preface, probably the one prepared for Morrow by a CIA staffer.

  The books, wrapped up in brown paper and dated September 6, were packed into the back of a large American station wagon, and taken to the home of Walter Cini, the CIA officer in The Hague. Two hundred copies were sent to headquarters in Washington. Most of the remaining books were sent to CIA stations or assets in Western Europe—200 to Frankfurt; 100 to Berlin; 100 to Munich; 25 to London; and 10 to Paris. The largest package, 365 books, was sent to Brussels.

  Visitors to the Soviet pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Universal and International Exposition first had to climb several flights of steps, as if approaching a great museum. Inside, two large statues of a male and a female worker in classic socialist-realist style greeted them. At the rear of the great central hall, which sprawled over nearly 120,000 square feet, stood a fifty-foot-tall bronze statue of Lenin. The revolutionary leader, his heavy coat draped over his shoulders, watched over Sputnik satellites, rows of agricultural machinery, models of Soviet jetliners, oil-drilling platforms, and coal mines, and exhibits on the collective farm and the typical Soviet kitchen.

  The didactic message was clear. The Soviet Union was an industrial power to be reckoned with. After the launch the previous year of Sputnik 1, the first satellite in space, the Russians appeared ascendant. “Socialist economic principles will guarantee us victory” in the contest with capitalism, visitors to the Soviet pavilion were told.

  Soviet brawn was also accompanied by a more seductive array of cultural offerings, from the Bolshoi Ballet to the Moscow circus, both at the fairgrounds and in the center of Brussels. The Soviets were going all out to awe and woo.

  Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic senator from Minnesota, harrumphed that “from what we know about Soviet plans there will be scarcely a credible Soviet theater group, ballet artist, musician, singer, dancer or acrobat left in the Soviet Union if his services can be used in Brussels.”

  The United States was slower to recognize that the Brussels Exposition was a Cold War battlefield. Congress only reluctantly appropriated $13.4 million for an American pavilion, compared with the estimated $50 million the Soviet Union planned to spend. And the organizers were dogged by uncertainty about what to include, and whether the United States should also acknowledge the failings of American society, particularly the mob violence surrounding the desegregation of the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, the previous year. A small annex exhibition dealing, in part, with race relations was opened in Brussels but quickly closed after objections from southern congressmen.

  The United States pavilion was a massive circular building with floor space to fit two football fields, and its creator, the architect Edward Stone, drew inspiration from the Roman Colosseum. With its translucent plastic roof, the structure was intended to be “very light and airy and crystalline.” The organizers decided that America should be sold through “indirection,” not “heavy, belabored and fatiguing propaganda.” And the pavilion became a celebration of American consumerism and entertainment. There were several fashion shows every day, square dancing, and a Disney-produced film of American vistas on a 360-degree screen that took viewers from the New York City skyline to the Grand Canyon. There were hot dogs and abstract-expressionist art; a jukebox and copies of a 480-page Sunday New York Times. Eisenhower insisted on voting machines, and behind the curtains visitors could choose their favorite president, movie star, and musician.

  When Anastas Mikoyan, the first deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, visited the U.S. pavilion, he chose Abraham Lincoln, Kim Novak, and Louis Armstrong, although he first asked if he could choose Shostakovich for the last category. Another Soviet visitor, the writer Boris Agapov, a member of the board of Novy Mir who had signed the letter rejecting Doctor Zhivago, was unimpressed with the American pavilion. “These are all lies.… That is why the character, the general thrust of the American exhibition evokes bewilderment and yet another sentiment, which is shame. It is a disgrace that a talented, creative, and hard-working people is represented as a people of sybarites and thoughtless braggarts.”

  Doctor Zhivago could not be handed out at the American pavilion, but the CIA had an ally nearby. The Vatican pavilion was called “Civitas Dei,” the “City of God.” The modernist pavilion was crowned by a gleaming white belfry rising to 190 feet and topped by a large cross. Behind the belfry, the main building swooped toward the ground like a ski jump. Inside there was a church, six small chapels, and exhibition halls with displays on the papacy and the history of the church. The pavilion was nestled close to both the U.S. and Soviet buildings.

  Vatican officials and local Roman Catholics began to prepare for Soviet visitors even before the fair opened. Irina Posnova, the founder of a religious publishing house in Belgium, saw an opportunity to proselytize. Born in Kiev in 1914, Posnova was the daughter of an exiled Orthodox theologian; she converted to Roman Catholicism while attending the Catholic University of Louvain. After World War II, Posnova founded Life with God, a Brussels-based organization that smuggled religious books in Russian into the Soviet Union. Posnova worked with the Vatican’s organizing committee to set up a small library “somewhat hidden” behind a curtain just off the pavilion’s Chapel of Silence—a place to reflect on the suppression of Christian communities around the world. With the help of Russian-speaking priests and lay volunteers, Life with God handed out religious literature, including bibles, prayer books, and some Russian literature. There was a steady stream of Soviet visitors to the Vatican pavilion, drawn, in part, by the presence of Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker, which had been loaned by the Louvre for the duration of the fair.

  Father Jan Joos, a Belgian priest and secretary-general of the Vatican organizing committee for the Brussels Expo, said three thousand Soviet tourists visited the Vatican pavilion over six months. He described them as from “the leading, privileged classes,” such as members of the Academy of Sciences, scholars, writers, engineers, collective-farm directors, and city mayors.

  Agapov also visited the Vatican pavilion and provided one of the few accounts of how Soviet visitors were greeted. He said he was first welcomed by a French-speaking priest who showed him Rodin’s sculpture. As they talked, he said, the conversation was interrupted by a “sturdy, sloppily dressed woman” who spoke loudly in Russian and introduced him to another priest. This priest—“Father Pierre”—was about thirty-five, with a rosy complexion, a ginger beard, blue eyes, and breath that smelled of cigars and cognac. He spoke like a native Muscovite.

  The priest told Agapov that modern man was confused, and only through the guidance of Christian principles could he find salvation. He led Agapov to the hidden library. Father Pierre explained, “We publish special bulletins, in which we state which movies, radio programs and books to watch and read, and which not to.” Agapov noted with some satisfaction that he was reminded of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Catholic Church’s list of banned authors and books.

  “Except for the gospels and prayer bo
oks,” Agapov observed, “you can obtain all sorts of brochures and booklets in the ‘City of God’ in which you can find God knows what about our country, communism, Soviet power—despite the fact that this sort of propaganda is in violation of the Exposition’s statute.”

  And, he continued, “Ladies with pointed noses are selling and distributing this with a ‘blessed’ smile.”

  In early September, these priests and ladies starting handing out copies of Doctor Zhivago in Russian. Finally, the CIA-sponsored edition of the novel was pressed into the hands of Soviet citizens. Soon the book’s blue linen covers were found littering the fairgrounds. Some who got the novel were ripping off the cover, dividing the pages, and stuffing them in their pockets to make the book easier to hide.

  A Russian weekly published in Germany by émigrés noted, “We Russians should be grateful to the organizers of the Vatican pavilion. Thanks to their efforts, the greatest contemporary work of Russian literature—Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, which is banned there—is able to find its way into the country. More than 500 copies were taken into Russia by common Russian people.”

  Word of the novel’s appearance at the fair quickly reached Pasternak. He wrote in September to his friend Pyotr Suvchinsky in Paris, “Is it true that Doctor Zhivago appeared in the original? It seems that visitors to the exhibition in Brussels have seen it.”

  The CIA was quite pleased with itself. “This phase can be considered completed successfully,” read a September 9 memo. And officials at the Soviet Russia Division noted that “as additional copies become available” they would be used “in contact and mailing operations and for travelers to take into the USSR.” Walter Cini, the CIA officer in The Hague, sent a copy of the English-language edition of Doctor Zhivago as a gift to his BVD colleague Joop van der Wilden. He inscribed it and signed off with a code name: “In appreciation of your courage and relentless efforts to make the monster squeal in anguish. Voltaire.”

  There was only one problem: Mouton had never signed a contract with Feltrinelli. The Russian edition printed in The Hague was illegal. The Italian publisher was furious when he learned about the distribution of the novel in Brussels. In a letter to Manya Harari, one of the English translators, on September 18 he wrote, “I have just seen that somebody has printed and published somewhere in Holland under my name (!) an edition of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO in Russian. I must say a rather extraordinary way of proceeding.” Feltrinelli hired a detective and sent his lawyer to The Hague “to enquire on the matter and have hell broken out.” He threatened to sue both Mouton and van der Beek, whose roles were quickly discovered.

  For the CIA, the contretemps generated unwelcome publicity. Der Spiegel in Germany followed up on reporting in the Dutch press and identified one of the volunteers at the Vatican pavilion as “Count Vladimir Tolstoy” and said he was associated with the “militant American cultural and propaganda organization which goes under the name of Committee for a Free Europe.”

  Pasternak apparently read the Spiegel article and asked a friend if “one of the publishers of DZ in the original, C(ount) Vladimir Tolstoy,” was one of Leo Tolstoy’s grandsons. The article would also have alerted Pasternak to the intrigue surrounding its publication in Russian.

  The American press picked up on the conspiracy. In early November, a New York Times books columnist wrote that “during the closing days of the Brussels Fair unknown parties stood before the Soviet pavilion giving copies of Doctor Zhivago—in Russian—to those interested. Origin of these copies? Classified.”

  Mouton held a press conference on November 2, and the company director Fred Eekhout mixed truth and lies to try to put an end to the speculation. He said de Ridder had first accepted delivery of the manuscript from some French person he believed was acting on behalf of Feltrinelli. This was nonsense. Mouton did not want to admit that it had dealt with a known Dutch anti-Communist agitator. The company eventually apologized in print, taking out ads in The New York Times, Corriere della Sera, The Times, Le Figaro, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among others, to say that “only owing to a deplorable misunderstanding” had Mouton published Doctor Zhivago in Russian.

  Posnova’s organization was also baldly dissembling. At a press conference held at the Foyer Oriental in Brussels on November 10, Father Antoine Ilc said the organization was invited to a conference in Milan in August and was told by some unnamed professor there that Feltrinelli wanted to print Doctor Zhivago in Russian as a gesture of gratitude to the author. Fifteen days later, the priest continued, “a gift of copies of Doctor Zhivago reached our residence.” The books, he said, came with a note: “For Soviet tourists.”

  The spies in Washington watched the coverage with some dismay, and on November 15, 1958, the CIA was first linked by name to the printing by the National Review Bulletin, a newsletter supplement for subscribers to the National Review, the conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr. A writer using the pseudonym Quincy observed with approval that copies of Doctor Zhivago were quietly shipped to the Vatican pavilion in Brussels: “That quaint workshop of amateur subversion, the Central Intelligence Agency, may be exorbitantly expensive but from time to time it produces some noteworthy goodies. This summer, for instance, [the] CIA forgot its feud with some of our allies and turned on our enemies—and mirabile dictu, succeeded most nobly.… In Moscow these books were passed from hand to hand as avidly as a copy of Fanny Hill in a college dormitory.”

  Mouton settled with Feltrinelli. The Dutch publishing house agreed to an “indemnity obligation” to print another five thousand copies for Feltrinelli. The Italian publisher imposed special controls on sales and said he would not permit the Dutch firm to fill any orders that might smell like exploitation of the book by intelligence operatives. Feltrinelli told journalists that he wanted only a small run of books in Russian “so that the 12 or 14 reviewers who are experts in Russian can appraise the literary quality of the work, which I feel is of the highest order.”

  Pasternak eventually saw a smuggled Russian-language edition of the novel—the Mouton edition printed for the CIA. He was sorely disappointed because it was based on an early uncorrected manuscript. “It abounds with errata,” he told Feltrinelli. “This is almost another text, not the one I wrote,” he complained to Jacqueline de Proyart, in a letter in March 1959. He asked her to make a “faithful edition.”

  Feltrinelli was anxious to end the dispute in the Netherlands because another had arisen in the United States. The University of Michigan announced in October—after the appearance of the Dutch edition but before its agreed deadline with the CIA—that it was moving forward with its own edition. The Italian publisher fired off a letter to Ann Arbor saying, “It is our duty to inform you that Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is protected by international copyright.” He followed up with two telegrams before Fred Wieck, in a brusque reply, said, “We would be interested to know on what grounds you claim to hold copyright on the Russian text of this novel in the United States of America.”

  Kurt Wolff of Pantheon, Pasternak’s American publisher for the English edition, sent an indignant letter to Hatcher, the president of the university. Noting the “frightful pressure,” Pasternak was facing at home, he wrote, “we witness the amazing spectacle where only two institutions try to deny him his basic rights: the Soviet Writers Union which refuses to allow his book to be published in Russia … and the University of Michigan Press which is about to publish his work without his or his agent’s permission.”

  Wolff asked the university “to right the wrong done to a man who cannot defend himself.”

  Wieck replied that the University believed it was extending a service to students and scholars by refusing to be bound by Feltrinelli’s effort to “extend worldwide the censorship of the Soviet Writers’ Union.

  “You can see, therefore, why we resent your indictment of the University Press,” Wieck continued, “and your placing of its procedures in the same category with those of the Soviet Writers Union.” Wiec
k, however, said he was willing to compromise and suggested that Wolff use his influence to secure a license for Michigan from Feltrinelli to avoid having the matter settled in court. Agreement was reached and a University of Michigan edition appeared in January 1959 based on the CIA proof obtained from Morrow.

  The CIA concluded that the printing was, in the end, “fully worth trouble in view obvious effect on Soviets,” according to a cable sent by Allen Dulles, the agency director. By November 1958, according to a report in Encounter, a CIA-sponsored journal, “copies of an unexpurgated Russian edition of Doctor Zhivago (published in Holland) have already found their way to the U.S.S.R. Their reported price on the black market is 200–300 rubles.”

  That was almost a week’s wages for a worker and a very steep price for a book in Moscow, but by then the Swedish Academy had awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Pasternak, and Muscovites were clamoring to get their hands on Doctor Zhivago.

  Chapter 10

  “He also looks the genius: raw nerves, misfortune, fatality.”

  On October 22, 1958, Max Frankel, Moscow correspondent for The New York Times, rushed out to Peredelkino to speak to Pasternak after the newspaper learned that the author of Doctor Zhivago seemed all but certain to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The announcement was expected the following day. The dacha was crowded and Pasternak was surrounded by about a dozen friends. The gathering turned into a celebration with Frankel’s news. There was a note of sedition in the air, and the reporter found himself running to the toilet to take furtive notes on some of the incendiary, alcohol-fueled remarks he was hearing. Buoyed by the atmosphere, Pasternak was forthright about the novel’s genesis and message: “This book is the product of an incredible time. All around, you could not believe it, young men and women were being sacrificed up to the worship of this ox.… It was what I saw all around that I was forced to write. I was afraid only that I would not be able to complete it.”