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

by Peter Finn

  “Don’t worry,” Slutsky replied. “I shall know how to make my point.”

  Slutsky had only recently been admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers, and he felt that his budding career would be ruined if he didn’t speak out against Pasternak. He kept his speech short and avoided the violent language of some of the other speakers. “A poet’s obligation is to seek the recognition of his own people, not of his enemies,” he said. “This year’s Nobel Prize winner could almost be called the winner of the Nobel Prize against Communism. It is a disgrace for a man who has grown up in our country to bear such a title.”

  In private, Slutsky was angry with Pasternak. He felt he had damaged the possibilities for the “young literature” emerging after Stalin’s death. Over time he was haunted by his participation. “That I spoke against Pasternak is my shame,” he said years later.

  The chairman of the meeting, Smirnov, also said that the “blot” on himself for his attack could “never be washed away.” But in a bitter exchange of letters with Yevtushenko in the 1980s, another speaker, Vladimir Soloukhin, said that Pasternak’s supporters, who remained silent, were as culpable as those who spoke against him. Yevtushenko, who attended the meeting, was approached about speaking, but refused.

  “Let’s agree that all of us, all 14 people, were cowards, time-servers, lickspittles, traitors and bastards who will never ‘clear themselves,’ ” wrote Soloukhin. He asked where Pasternak’s friends were, among the hundreds in the room. “Why did they keep silent? Not a single sound, not a single move. Why? Not a single exclamation or remark or word in defense of the poet.”

  Yevtushenko replied that “for 30 years, this sin of yours, Vladimir Alexeyevich, has lain safely hidden.…

  “But glasnost, like spring waters, has dissolved the shroud of secrecy and your old guilt comes to light like the arm of a murdered child emerges from the snow when it begins to melt,” Yevtushenko continued. “I have never considered my refusal as heroism. However, is there no difference between direct participation in a crime and refusal to participate?”

  Most of the speakers, in contrast to Slutsky, wielded the knife with striking vehemence. Korneli Zelinsky, the literary scholar who taught at the Gorky Literary Institute, was once a friend of Pasternak’s, but his speech was “particularly vile.” At Pasternak’s request, he had chaired one of his recitals at the Polytechnic Museum in 1932 and had written about Pasternak’s work over the years, generally favorably. He had described Pasternak as a “dacha-dweller of genius” and said some of the poems in the collection Second Birth would “always remain in Russian poetry … as masterpieces of intimate lyric poetry.” After the war, Zelinsky attended one of the first readings of Doctor Zhivago at the dacha in Peredelkino.

  Zelinsky told the audience that he had gone through the novel the previous year with “a fine-tooth comb.” He had been involved in the negotiations that led to a contract in early 1957 to bring out an abridged version of the book in the Soviet Union. And Zelinsky had expressed some mild concerns about the novel’s remoteness from contemporary themes in the summer of 1958 in an interview with Radio Warsaw. Perhaps it was his involvement with Pasternak’s work that led him to speak with such venom.

  “I was left with a feeling of great heaviness after reading” Doctor Zhivago, Zelinsky told the audience. “I felt as though I had been literally spat upon. The whole of my life seemed to be defiled in the novel.… I have no wish to spell out all the evil-smelling nastiness which leaves such a bad taste. It was very strange for me to see Pasternak, the poet and artist, sink to such a level. But what we have subsequently learned has revealed in full the underlying truth, that terrible traitorous philosophy and that pervasive taint of treachery.

  “You ought to know, comrades, that Pasternak’s name in the West where I have just been is now synonymous with war. Pasternak is a standard-bearer of the cold war. It is not mere chance that the most reactionary, monarchistic, rabid circles have battened upon his name.… I repeat that Pasternak’s name spells war. It heralds the cold war.”

  After Zelinsky spoke, he approached Konstantin Paustovsky, one of the grand old men of Russian letters, who turned away in disgust and refused to shake his hand.

  Smirnov moved to end the meeting with thirteen more writers waiting in the wings to speak. The crowd was exhausted. After a show of hands, Smirnov announced that the resolution was adopted unanimously. “Not true! Not unanimously! I voted against!” shouted a woman who pushed her way to the front of the crowd as others headed for the exits. The lone dissenter, a Gulag survivor, was Anna Alliluyeva, Stalin’s sister-in-law.

  The pillorying of Pasternak was front-page news around the world. Correspondents in Moscow reported in detail on the media campaign, the expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers, the acceptance and rejection of the Nobel Prize, and the threat of exile. Editorialists weighed in on the startling virulence of the assault on a solitary writer. In an editorial headlined “Pasternak and the Pygmies,” The New York Times declared, “In the fury, venom and intensity of this reaction there is much that is illuminating. Superficially the Soviet leaders are strong. At their command are hydrogen bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles, large armies and fleets of mighty bombers and warships. Against them is one elderly man who is completely helpless before the physical power of the Kremlin. Yet such is the moral authority of Pasternak, so vividly does he symbolize the conscience of an outraged Russia striking back at its tormentors, that it is the men in the Kremlin who tremble.”

  In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the cartoonist Bill Mauldin created a Pulitzer Prize–winning image of Pasternak as a ragged Gulag prisoner wearing a ball and chain and chopping wood in the snow with another inmate. The caption read: “I won the Nobel Prize for Literature. What was your crime?”

  The French newspaper Dimanche described the literary crisis as “an intellectual Budapest” for Khrushchev.

  The Swedes issued their own rebuke. On October 27, the Lenin Peace Prize was presented in Stockholm to the poet Artur Lundkvist. Three members of the Swedish Academy who had been scheduled to attend, including Österling, boycotted the event. A string quartet that was booked to perform refused to play, and a florist sent wilting flowers in protest.

  Bewilderment at the treatment of Pasternak only increased when three Soviet scientists won the Nobel Prize for Physics. The award was celebrated in Moscow as a national achievement; Western correspondents were invited to meet two of the winners at the Russian Academy of Sciences, where they discussed their research into atomic particles—and their hobbies and home life. The Soviet press was forced into some contortions in logic to explain the contrasting coverage of the different Nobel Prizes, often on the same pages. Pravda explained that while the award in science illustrated “the recognition by the Swedish Academy of Sciences of the major merits of Russian and Soviet scientists … the award of this prize for literature was prompted entirely for political motives.” Bourgeois scientists “were capable of objectivity,” the newspaper concluded, but the assessment of literary works is “entirely under the influence of the ideology of the dominant class.”

  Feltrinelli was in Hamburg when the loud disparagement of his writer began, and he immediately began to use his contacts in publishing to rally writers in defense of Pasternak. Literary societies from Mexico to India issued statements as the drama unfolded. A group of prominent writers, including T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Somerset Maugham, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, J. B. Priestley, Rebecca West, Bertrand Russell, and Aldous Huxley, sent a telegram to the Union of Soviet Writers to protest. “We are profoundly anxious about the state of one of the world’s great poets and writers, Boris Pasternak. We consider his novel, Doctor Zhivago, a moving personal testimony and not a political document. We appeal to you in the name of the great Russian literary tradition for which you stand not to dishonor it by victimizing a writer revered throughout the whole civilized world.” PEN, the international association of writers, sent its own message, saying the o
rganization was “very distressed by rumors concerning Pasternak” and demanded protection for the poet by maintaining the conditions for creative freedom. “Writers throughout the world are thinking of him fraternally.”

  Radio Liberation solicited messages of support for broadcast from Upton Sinclair, Isaac Bashevis Singer, William Carlos Williams, Lewis Mumford, Pearl Buck, and Gore Vidal, among others. Ernest Hemingway said he would give Pasternak a house if he was expelled. “I want to create for him the conditions he needs to carry on with his writing,” said Hemingway. “I can understand how divided Boris must be in his own mind right now. I know how deeply, with all his heart, he is attached to Russia. For a genius such as Pasternak, separation from his country would be a tragedy. But if he comes to us we shall not disappoint him. I shall do everything in my modest power to save this genius for the world. I think of Pasternak every day.”

  The controversy reinvigorated sales of the novel across Europe, and in the United States, where it was published in September, the novel finally hit the top of The New York Times bestseller list, dislodging Lolita. The book had already sold seventy thousand copies in the United States in its first six weeks. “That is fantastic,” his publisher Kurt Wolff wrote. The Nobel controversy boosted sales of an already successful book to rare heights. “You have moved beyond the history of literature into the history of mankind,” Wolff concluded in a letter to Pasternak toward the end of the year. “Your name has become a household word throughout the world.”

  The U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles told reporters that Pasternak’s refusal of the Nobel Prize was forced on the writer by the Soviet authorities. “The system of international communism,” he said, “insists on conformity not only in deed but in thought. Anything a little out of line, they try to stamp out.”

  The U.S. embassy in Moscow cautioned the State Department against official involvement, and senior officials in Washington said relatively little; instead they relished what they saw as a propaganda coup for the West that was entirely manufactured in Moscow. At a meeting of Dulles’s senior staff, he was told that “the communists’ treatment of Pasternak is one of their worst blunders. It is on par in terms of embarrassment and damage to them with the brutality in Hungary.” Dulles told his staff to explore the possibility of covertly subsidizing publication of the novel in the Far East and the Middle East; presumably he knew that his brother, the head of the CIA, had already organized a Russian edition as they both served on the Operations Control Board. State Department officials were told to coordinate their publication efforts with the “other agency,” government-speak for the CIA.

  Dulles told his senior staff that he hadn’t had a chance to read the book but “supposed he would have to do so.” He asked if the novel was damaging to the Communist cause. Abbott Washburn, deputy director of the United States Information Agency, said, “It was because it reveals the stifling of an individual under the oppressive communist system and that the very suppression of the book shows that the communist leaders regard it as injurious.” Others at the meeting argued that Doctor Zhivago was not particularly anti-Communist but “that the treatment received by the author was the real pay dirt for us.”

  At first, the CIA also concluded that it should not overplay its hand. Director Allen Dulles said agency assets, including Radio Liberation, should give “maximum factual play” to the Nobel Award “without any propagandistic commentary.” Dulles also said the agency should use every opportunity to have Soviet citizens read the novel.

  For some within the CIA, Pasternak’s plight was another reminder of the West’s inability to affect events inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. “Reactions of revulsion and shock cannot conceal from Free World consciousness the sense of its own impotence to further the cause of liberalization within the Bloc,” stated an agency memo sent to Dulles. “Any further attempt on our part to portray the personal ordeal of Pasternak as a triumph of freedom will only, as in the case of Hungary, heighten the tragic irony which informs it.”

  Dulles was not persuaded. At a meeting of the National Security Council’s Operations Control Board a few days later, there was “considerable discussion of the actions which the U.S. has taken and might take to exploit” the Zhivago affair. Earlier, some on Dulles’s staff had recommended that CIA assets should be used to “sparkplug” anti-Soviet coverage, and encourage the “leftist press and writers” in the West to express their outrage.

  The sound of Western consternation was nothing new in Moscow. Much more troubling for the Soviet Union than the statements of “bourgeois writers” and American officials such as John Foster Dulles was the damage to its reputation among friends and allies, and in parts of the world where it expected a sympathetic hearing.

  In Lebanon, the affair was front-page news, and the CIA noted approvingly that in a front-page editorial the newspaper Al-Binaa concluded that “free thought and dialectical materialism do not go together.” In Morocco, the daily Al-Alam, which was rarely critical of the Soviet Union, said, whatever the Soviet Union accuses the West of in the future, it “will never be able to deny its suppression of Pasternak.” The Times of Karachi described the treatment of the writer as “despicable.”

  The Brazilian writer Jorge Amado said the expulsion of Pasternak from the writers’ union demonstrated that it was still controlled by elements from Stalin’s time. The Brazilian paper Última Hora, which had supported good relations with the Soviet Union, called the affair “cultural terrorism.”

  The Irish playwright Sean O’Casey wrote to Literaturnaya Gazeta to protest the decision of the Union of Soviet Writers. “As a friend of your magnificent land since 1917, I would plead for the withdrawal of this expulsion order,” he said. “Every artist is something of an anarchist, as Bernard Shaw tells us in one of his prefaces, and the artist should be forgiven many things.”

  The Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness, a Nobel laureate and the chairman of the Iceland-Soviet Friendship Society, sent a telegram to Khrushchev: “I implore you as level-headed statesman to use your influence mitigating malicious onslaughts of sectarian intolerance upon an old meritorious Russian poet Boris Pasternak. Why light-heartedly arouse the wrath of the world’s poets, writers, intellectuals and socialists against the Soviet Union in this matter? Kindly spare friends of the Soviet Union an incomprehensible and most unworthy spectacle.”

  “Iceland?” said Pasternak when he learned of the telegram, “Iceland, but if China intervened it would help?”

  In fact, the case was drawing major attention in Asia, particularly in India, a nonaligned country that nonetheless had strong ties with the Soviet Union. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had visited the Soviet Union in 1955 and Khrushchev had traveled to India the following year. The treatment of Pasternak infuriated leading writers in India, including some prominent Communists. And concern about his plight culminated at a press conference in New Delhi when Nehru said Indian opinion had been pained by the daily abuse. “A noted writer, even if he expresses an opinion opposed to the dominating opinion, according to us should be respected and it should be given free play,” he told reporters.

  The Soviet Union’s cultural diplomacy was also being damaged. The Norwegian press demanded that the government abrogate a recently signed cultural-exchange program. Swedish officials threatened to postpone indefinitely a youth-exchange program. Twenty-eight Austrian writers said in an open letter that all future cultural and scientific exchanges should be conditional on Pasternak’s complete rehabilitation as a citizen and a writer.

  The international backlash was unwelcome and the Kremlin wanted a way out of the crisis. After receiving Pasternak’s letter, Khrushchev ordered a halt. “Enough. He’s admitted his mistakes. Stop it.” The terms were left to the bureaucracy.

  While the writers were fulminating at Cinema House, Polikarpov began maneuvering to end the affair. Khesin, the man who had cold-shouldered Ivinskaya the day before the meeting, phoned her at her mother’s apartment, where she had g
one to try to get some sleep. (Ivinskaya’s movements were clearly being monitored.) Khesin oozed a fake friendliness. “Olga Vsevolodovna, my dear, you’re a good girl. They have received the letter from Boris Leonidovich and everything will be all right, just be patient. What I have to say is that we must see you straight away.”

  Ivinskaya was irritated by the approach, and told Khesin she didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Polikarpov came on the line. “We must see you,” he said. “We’ll drive over to Sobinov Street now, you put on a coat and come down, and we’ll go together to Peredelkino. We must bring Boris Leonidovich to Moscow, to the Central Committee, as soon as possible.”

  Ivinskaya told her daughter to go ahead to alert Pasternak. It seemed to Ivinskaya that if Polikarpov was in such a hurry and willing to go to Peredelkino to fetch Pasternak, it could only mean that Khrushchev would meet the writer. A black government Zil pulled up outside Ivinskaya’s mother’s apartment building, and Polikarpov and Khesin were inside. The sedan traveled in the middle lane reserved on Moscow streets for select government cars and whisked them to Peredelkino ahead of Irina.

  Pasternak was now emotional and fragile, subject to severe mood swings and very much caged in his dacha. Telegrams from well-wishers in the West were piling up on his desk, but at home he felt increasingly isolated and people he thought of as friends were shunning him. When the sculptor Zoya Maslenikova visited Pasternak that Friday around lunchtime, he broke down and wept, his head on the table; the prompt for his tears was a telegram that contained a line from one of his Zhivago poems: “To see no distance is lonely.”