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

by Peter Finn

  “Bearing in mind Pasternak’s political and moral downfall, his betrayal of the Soviet Union, socialism, peace and progress, which was rewarded with the Nobel Prize for the sake of fanning the cold war, the presidium of the board of the Union of Writers … strip Boris Pasternak of the title of Soviet writer and expel him from the Union of Writers of the USSR.”

  Pasternak and Ivinskaya were now being followed by the KGB. The agents made no secret of their presence and harassed the couple—sometimes pretending to hold drunken parties outside Ivinskaya’s apartment on Popatov Street. “Good day to you, microphone,” said Pasternak when he entered Ivinskaya’s room in Peredelkino. She recalled: “We spoke mostly in whispers, frightened of our own shadows, and constantly glancing sideways at the walls—even they seemed hostile to us.” Pasternak took solace in small gestures of kindness like the postman who greeted him as always despite the secret policemen parked nearby.

  On Tuesday morning, Lydia Chukovskaya went to see Pasternak. As she walked from her father’s house, she saw four men sitting in a car, watching her. “To my shame, I have to say that fear already touched me.” When she approached Pasternak’s gate she expected to hear someone shout stop.

  “Did they expel me?” asked Pasternak.

  Chukovskaya nodded.

  Pasternak took her inside and sat with her in the piano room.

  “In the bright morning light, I saw his yellow face, with his shining eyes, and his old man’s neck.”

  Pasternak began to talk with his usual fervor, jumping from subject to subject, and interrupting himself with questions.

  “What do you think, will they also hurt Lyonya?” he asked, speaking of his son.

  Pasternak told Chukovskaya that the Ivanovs had warned him to move into the city because they were afraid the dacha would be stoned by protesters.

  He jumped up and stood in front of Chukovskaya. “But that’s nonsense, isn’t it? Their imagination has run away with them?”

  “Right,” said Chukovskaya, “pure nonsense. How is that possible?”

  Chukovskaya, trying to change the subject, mentioned a recent poem by Pasternak.

  “Poems are unimportant,” he replied a little peevishly. “I don’t understand why people busy themselves with my verses. I always feel awkward when your dad pays attention to this nonsense. The only thing worthwhile that I have done in my life is the novel. And it’s not true that people only value the novel because of politics. That’s a lie. They read it because they love it.”

  In his voice, she heard “something dry, something troubled, something more restless than in his usual impassioned speech.”

  Outside, in the quiet of the morning, Pasternak glanced around. “Strange,” he said, “there is nobody there, yet it feels as though everybody is watching us.”

  Later that day, Pasternak went over to see Ivinskaya, who had come out from Moscow with her teenage son, Mitya. His mood had darkened and Pasternak spoke in a tremble. “I cannot stand this business anymore,” he said to Olga and her son. “I think it’s time to leave this life, it’s too much.”

  Pasternak suggested that he and Olga take a fatal dose of Nembutal, a barbiturate.

  “It will cost them very dearly,” he said. “It will be a slap in the face.”

  Mitya went outside after listening to this plan to have his mother commit suicide. “Mitya, forgive me, don’t think too badly of me, my precious child, for taking your mother with me, but we can’t live, and it will be easier for you after our death.”

  The boy was pale with shock but obedient. “You are right, Boris Leonidovich. Mother must do what you do.”

  Ivinskaya, who had no desire to kill herself, told Pasternak that his death would suit the authorities.

  “It shows we were weak and knew we were wrong, and they will gloat over us into the bargain,” she said.

  Ivinskaya asked him for time to see what the authorities wanted, and if there was no way out then, she said, “we’ll put an end to it.” Pasternak agreed. “Very well, go wherever it is today … and we’ll decide then. I cannot stand up anymore to this hounding.”

  After Pasternak left, Ivinskaya and her son walked through a nasty sleet to Fedin’s house. The roads were soft with slush, and by the time they reached their destination they were soaking wet and trailing mud. Initially, Fedin’s daughter wouldn’t let them beyond the hallway, but her father eventually appeared on the landing above and told Ivinskaya to come up to his study. She told him that Pasternak was contemplating suicide. “Tell me: what do they want from him? Do they really want him to commit suicide?”

  Fedin walked over to the window, and Ivinskaya thought she saw tears in his eyes.

  But when he turned around he had adopted his official manner: “Boris Leonidovich has dug such an abyss between himself and us that it cannot be crossed,” he said.

  “You have told me a terrible thing,” he continued. “You realize, don’t you, that you must restrain him. He must not inflict a second blow on his country.”

  Ivinskaya said she was looking for a way out and was “willing to write any letter to whomever, and convince Pasternak to sign it.”

  Fedin wrote a note to Polikarpov about Ivinskaya’s visit. “I think you should be aware of the real or imaginary, serious or theatrical intention of Pasternak. You should know there is such a threat, or maybe it is an attempt to maneuver.”

  The following morning, Pasternak and Ivinskaya spoke by phone and argued. Ivinskaya accused him of being selfish. “Of course, they won’t harm you,” she said, “but I’ll come off worse.”

  That same morning, Pasternak’s brother drove him into the Central Telegraph Office near the Kremlin. He sent a second telegram, in French, to Stockholm: “Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must reject this undeserved prize which has been presented to me. Please do not receive my voluntary rejection with displeasure—Pasternak.”

  The Swedish Academy responded that it “has received your refusal with deep regret, sympathy and respect.” It was only the third time a Nobel award had been rejected. Three German scientists had refused the prize on Hitler’s orders. The German dictator had been infuriated when Carl von Ossietzky, who was in a concentration camp, was awarded the peace prize in 1935, and Hitler decreed that in the future no German could accept a Nobel Prize.

  Pasternak sent a second telegram to the Central Committee informing the Kremlin of his decision and asking the authorities to allow Ivinskaya, who had been blackballed by official publishers, to work again.

  Pasternak told a Western reporter: “I made the decision quite alone. I did not consult anybody. I have not even told my good friends.”

  The strain was now beginning to show. Pasternak’s son Yevgeni was shocked when he saw his father later that day. Pasternak was “grey and disheveled,” he later wrote.

  “My father was unrecognizable.”

  Ivinskaya met Polikarpov and he told her that she had to stay by Pasternak’s side and prevent him from getting any “silly ideas into his head.” (The Central Committee also dispatched a nurse to Pasternak’s dacha to keep watch over him; the nurse was told she was not wanted, but she refused to leave and was eventually set up with a cot in the drawing room.)

  “This whole scandal must be settled—which we will be able to do with your help,” Polikarpov told Ivinskaya. “You can help him find his way back to the people again. But if anything happens to him, the responsibility will be yours.”

  The decision to reject the Nobel Prize brought no respite, however. In fact, it was treated as an act of spite by a man who was expected to surrender and make no attempt to control events. “This is an even dirtier provocation,” said Smirnov, reversing his support for Pasternak. The refusal of the prize, he said, “carries treachery still further.”

  Chapter 12

  “Pasternak’s name spells war.”

  The evening before Pasternak sent the telegram to Stockholm rejecting the prize, Vladimir Semicha
stny, the head of Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party, was summoned to a meeting with Khrushchev at the Kremlin. The Soviet leader was waiting in his office with Mikhail Suslov, the party’s enforcer of ideological purity.

  Khrushchev remarked that Semichastny was making a major speech the following evening and told him he wanted to include a section on Pasternak. Semichastny said that something on the Nobel controversy might not be suited to the speech, which was supposed to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Komsomol organization.

  “We’ll find a place where it fits,” said Khrushchev, who called in a stenographer. Khrushchev dictated several pages of notes, and goosed up the speech with a string of insults. He promised Semichastny that he would visibly applaud when he reached the passage about Pasternak. “Everyone will understand it,” Khrushchev said. The following evening, on October 29, Semichastny spoke before twelve thousand young people at the Sports Palace in Moscow. The address was broadcast live on television and on the radio.

  “As the Russian proverb goes, every flock has its mangy sheep,” said Semichastny as Khrushchev beamed in the background. “We have such a mangy sheep in our socialist society in the person of Pasternak, who appeared with his slanderous work.… And this man has lived in our country and been better provided for than the average workman who worked, labored and fought. Now this man has gone and spat in the people’s face. What can we call this? Sometimes, incidentally, we talk about a pig and say this, that or the other about it quite undeservedly. I must say this is a calumny on the pig. As everybody who has anything to do with this animal knows, one of the peculiarities of the pig is that it never makes a mess where it eats or sleeps. Therefore if we compare Pasternak with a pig, then we must say that a pig will never do what he has done. Pasternak, this man who considers himself amongst the best representatives of society, has fouled the spot where he ate and cast filth on those by whose labor he lives and breathes.”

  Semichastny was interrupted by repeated bursts of applause. He then issued the threat Pasternak feared most: “Why shouldn’t this internal emigrant breathe the capitalist air which he so yearned for and which he spoke of in his book? I am sure our society would welcome that. Let him become a real emigrant and go to his capitalist paradise. I am sure that neither society nor the government would hinder him in any way—on the contrary, they would consider that his departure from our midst would clear the air.”

  The following morning, Pasternak read accounts of Semichastny’s speech. He discussed the possibility of emigrating with his wife. She said that in order to live in peace he could go. Pasternak was surprised and asked, “With you and Lyonya?” referring to his son.

  “Not in my life, but I wish you all the best and hope you’ll spend your last years in honor and peace,” said Zinaida. “Lyonya and I will have to denounce you, but you’ll understand, that is just a formality.”

  “If you refuse to go abroad with me, I will not go, never,” said Pasternak.

  Pasternak also spoke to Ivinskaya, and wrote and tore up a note to the government requesting permission for Ivinskaya and her family to emigrate with him. Pasternak felt completely tied to Russia, and, in any case, he again found it impossible to choose between his two families. “I must have the work-a-day life I know here, the birch trees, the familiar troubles—even the familiar harassments.”

  Ivinskaya feared Pasternak might be given no choice. And she continued to try to wheedle some form of compromise. She went to see Grigori Khesin, who headed the “author’s rights” section of the writers’ union. He had always treated Ivinskaya well and had long declared his admiration for Pasternak. But his agreeability had vanished and he greeted his guest coldly.

  “What are we to do?” asked Ivinskaya. “There is this dreadful speech by Semichastny. What are we to do?”

  “Olga Vsevolodovna,” replied Khesin, “there is now no further advice for us to give you.… There are certain things one cannot forgive—for the country’s sake. No, I’m afraid I cannot give you any advice.”

  As Ivinskaya left, slamming the door behind her, she was approached by a young copyright lawyer, Isidor Gringolts, who said he would like to help. Gringolts described himself as an admirer of Pasternak: “For me, Boris Leonidovich is a saint!” Ivinskaya, desperate for any help, didn’t question his gushing solicitousness. They agreed to meet two hours later at the apartment of Ivinskaya’s mother. When Gringolts arrived he suggested that Pasternak write directly to Khrushchev to avoid being expelled from the country, and he offered to help draft a letter.

  Ivinskaya called together her daughter, Irina, and some of Pasternak’s close friends, and they debated the merits of a direct appeal to Khrushchev. The campaign seemed increasingly sinister—Pasternak was receiving threatening letters, and there were rumors that the house in Peredelkino would be sacked by a mob. One night a group of local thugs threw stones at the dacha and shouted anti-Semitic abuse. After Semichastny’s speech, a demonstration of workers and young Communists outside Pasternak’s home threatened to get out of hand, and police reinforcements were called to the scene.

  Khesin of the writers’ union had also informed Ivinskaya that unless Pasternak showed remorse he would be expelled from the country.

  “It seemed clear to me that we had to give in,” said Ivinskaya, who rejected her daughter Irina’s defiant insistence that Pasternak should never apologize. Ivinskaya’s stance was supported by the chain-smoking Ariadna Efron, the poet Tsvetaeva’s daughter. Efron had just returned to Moscow after sixteen years in the camps and exile; she didn’t think a letter would achieve much, but thought it couldn’t hurt.

  The group reworked the text prepared by Gringolts to make it sound more like Pasternak. A draft of the letter was brought to Pasternak in Peredelkino by Irina and Koma Ivanov. He met them at the gate of the dacha. “What do you think, with whom will I be expelled?” he asked. “My thought is: in Russian history, those who lived in exile meant a great deal more to the country: Herzen, Lenin.”

  The three walked down to the village post office, where Pasternak had a long telephone conversation with Ivinskaya. He agreed to review the letter and made only one change—adding that he was tied to Russia by birth, not to the Soviet Union. He signed a few blank pages in case his friends needed to make further revisions. His willingness to resist was draining away:

  Dear Nikita Sergeyevich,

  I am addressing you personally, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Government.

  From Comrade Semichastny’s speech I learn that the government would not put any obstacles in the way of my departure from the USSR.

  For me this is impossible. I am tied to Russia by birth, by life and by work.

  I cannot conceive of my destiny separate from Russia, or outside it. Whatever my mistakes and failings, I could not imagine that I should find myself at the center of such a political campaign as has been worked up around my name in the West.

  Once aware of this, I informed the Swedish Academy of my voluntary renunciation of the Nobel Prize.

  Departure beyond the borders of my country would for me be tantamount to death and I therefore request you not to take this extreme measure against me.

  With my hand on my heart, I can say that I have done something for Soviet literature, and may still be of service to it.

  B. Pasternak

  Irina and a friend brought the letter to the Central Committee building on the Old Square that night. They asked a guard smoking in the shadows of the entryway where they could hand in a letter for Khrushchev.

  “Who is it from?” asked the guard.

  “Pasternak,” replied Irina.

  The guard took the letter.

  At noon the following day, the virulence of the offensive reached something of a climax inside Cinema House, a classic piece of constructivist architecture near the writers’ union. About eight hundred writers from the Moscow branch of the union crowded into the main theater to discuss the single
agenda item—“the conduct of B. Pasternak.” The meeting was designed to rubber-stamp Pasternak’s expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers and, in the wake of Semichastny’s speech, echo his call for Pasternak’s expulsion to the West. Attendance was mandatory and the brave simply called in sick. There was already a heaving, moblike atmosphere when Sergei Smirnov opened the meeting. Smirnov spoke at great length and recapped the usual charges against Pasternak: remoteness from the people, the mediocre prose of his shocking novel, and his treachery in colluding with foreigners. “He sent the manuscript to the Italian publisher Feltrinelli, who is a renegade and a deserter from the progressive camp, and you know that there is no worse enemy than the renegade and that the renegade nurses an especially strong hatred for the thing that he has betrayed.” At times Smirnov’s blustering indignation stretched to the almost comic: “A Nobel Prize went to the fascist-inclined French writer Camus, who is very little known in France and who is morally the kind of person that no decent person would ever sit by.”

  Murmurs of approval rippled through the crowd and some chorused: “Shame!”

  The speech’s defining element was not the outrage but the undercurrents of jealousy and long-standing resentment that surfaced in Smirnov’s mocking tone and his attempt to imitate Pasternak’s way of talking. The myth of Pasternak was fostered by his small group of friends, Smirnov said, and it was one “of an entirely apolitical poet, a child in politics, who understands nothing and is locked away in his castle of ‘pure art’ where he turns out his talented works.… From this coterie, this narrow circle around Pasternak we have heard ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ about his talent and his greatness in literature. Let us not hide the fact that there have been people among Pasternak’s friends who have stated at meetings that when Pasternak’s name is spoken, people should stand.”

  The meeting ran for five hours, and Smirnov was merely the first of fourteen speakers. And they included some surprising names. When Yevtushenko saw that the poet Boris Slutsky, who had solicited Pasternak’s opinion on his verse earlier that summer, was scheduled to speak, he warned him to be careful, fearing he would defend Pasternak, rile the crowd, and hurt himself.