by Peter Finn
When he got home, Pasternak nonetheless put up signs in English, French, and German on his front and side doors in Peredelkino. They stated: “Pasternak does not receive. He is forbidden to receive foreigners.” Zinaida also continued to insist that he not admit foreigners. “You have to stop receiving that trash,” she told him, “or else they will cross the threshold of this house over my dead body.”
The signs were routinely taken as souvenirs, and the message varied: “Journalists and others, please go away. I am busy.” When the journalist Patricia Blake visited him on Easter, Pasternak spoke to her on the top step of his porch and did not invite her in. “Please forgive me for my terrible rudeness,” he said, explaining that he was in serious trouble and banned from meeting foreigners. Although Blake found him “astonishingly young for a man of sixty-nine, she was shocked by the immense weariness in his face, in his whole bearing.” When she left the dacha, plainclothes policemen followed her back to the train station. The Swedish professor Nils Åke Nilsson didn’t make it out of the station before the police told him to return to Moscow. The enforced isolation extended to warnings that Pasternak should not attend public events in Moscow. His friends shrank to a small circle, and the close monitoring continued; the KGB recorded the names of the guests who attended his sixty-ninth-birthday party at the dacha.
The CIA’s efforts to exploit Doctor Zhivago were re-energized by the Nobel crisis. The agency continued to try to get its dwindling supply of Russian-language copies of Doctor Zhivago into the Soviet Union, and it also purchased copies of the English edition for distribution. At first, the agency gave the novel only to non-Americans who were traveling to the Soviet Union, preferably by air rather than train because it calculated that fewer of those passengers would be thoroughly searched. If stopped and checked, visitors carrying the novel were instructed to say they purchased it from a Russian émigré or it was obtained at the Brussels Fair so that the smuggling effort could not be linked to the U.S. government.
As the storm over the Nobel Prize abated, the CIA decided that other parts of the U.S. government, as well as American travelers, could openly participate in the novel’s dissemination. The agency calculated that the original rationale for secrecy—to avoid the “possibility of personal reprisal against Pasternak”—was no longer an issue.
“The worldwide discussion of the book and Pasternak’s own personal statements have shown that his personal position has not become worse,” a CIA memo concluded. “In other words, an all-out overt exploitation of Dr. Zhivago would not harm Pasternak more than he has already harmed himself.” Shortly afterward, the Soviet Russia Division said it was forwarding by sea freight a batch of copies of the University of Michigan edition of Doctor Zhivago so that American travelers in Europe could also carry it into the Soviet Union: “It would be quite natural for an American who speaks or reads Russian to be carrying and reading the book, which has been number one on the bestseller list for the past three months.”
The CIA also provided elaborate guidelines for its agents to encourage tourists to talk about literature and Doctor Zhivago with Soviet citizens they might meet.
“We feel that Dr. Zhivago is an excellent springboard for conversations with Soviets on the general theme of ‘Communism versus Freedom of Expression,’ ” the head of the Soviet Russia Division, John Maury, wrote in a memo in April 1959. “Travelers should be prepared to discuss with their Soviet contacts not only the basic theme of the book itself—a cry for the freedom and dignity of the individual—but also the plight of the individual in the communist society. The whole Pasternak affair is indeed a tragic but classic example of the system of thought control which the party has always used to maintain its position of power over the intellectual. Like jamming, censorship, and the party’s ideological decrees for writers and artists, the banning of this book is another example of the means which the regime must use to control the Soviet mind. It is a reflection of the Nekulturnost, the intellectual barbarity, and the cultural sterility which are features of the closed society.”
The memo went on to say that Americans and other visitors could raise doubts about the tenets of socialist realism: “Perhaps a good opening to such conversations is to ask the Soviet interlocutor about the latest developments in Soviet drama, poetry, art, etc. A sympathetic but curious attitude towards the innovations and trends in the Soviet artistic world will usually set a friendly tone for the conversation. After discussing the latest artistic developments, a Westerner can inquire about what makes the works of Soviet writers such as Sholokhov, Pasternak, Margarita Aliger, Fedin … as great as they are. After discussing the works of these writers he can ask what limits the party has placed upon artistic works.”
Maury then suggests that the tourist “can point out that a true artist must be free to speak of the ideals as well as the iniquities of any society, to criticize capitalism or communism, in short to say what he believes to be true. A number of American and European writers such as Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Sartre, Camus and others have criticized as well as defended various aspects of life in their home countries.”
Agency officials congratulated themselves that “in one form or another, including full-length and condensed books and serials in indigenous languages, this book has been spread throughout the world, with assistance from this agency in a number of areas where interest might not normally be great.” (Unfortunately, CIA documents provide no further detail on these efforts.) The CIA also considered publishing an anthology of Pasternak’s works, including a pirated, Russian-language edition of his Essay in Autobiography. This had recently been published in translation in France, and the agency obtained the Russian-language manuscript from which the French translation was made.
In the end, the CIA just went forward with another edition of Doctor Zhivago. As early as August 1958, even before the publication of the first Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago, the CIA began to consider a miniature, paperback edition to be printed on “bible-stock” or similar lightweight paper. Such an edition had the obvious benefit of being “more easily concealed and infiltrated” than either the Mouton or University of Michigan editions. During the height of the Nobel crisis, officials at the agency also considered an abridged edition of the novel that could be handed out to Soviet sailors or even ballooned into East Germany. In November 1958, the Soviet Russia Division began to firm up plans for its miniature edition. In a memo to the acting deputy director for Plans, the chief of the Soviet Russia Division said he believed that there was “tremendous demand on the part of students and intellectuals to obtain copies of this book.” The agency reported that Soviet customs officials were instructed to search tourist baggage “for this particularly hot item.” In fact, in late 1958, the Soviet Union reinstituted searches of tourist luggage, which it had abandoned after the death of Stalin. One of the seized Mouton copies of the CIA edition of Doctor Zhivago was turned over in 1959 to the closed special collections section of Moscow’s V. I. Lenin State Library, where top party officials and approved researchers could read banned publications. Books designated for the shelves in this area of the library were affixed with one or two purple hexagonal stamps, the marks of the censor. Different censors had different numbers; Doctor Zhivago was stamped once with “124”—a designation that should have allowed some people to read it. But the novel was kept under strict KGB embargo and was off-limits even to favored academics, according to a former librarian in the special collections section.
The CIA had its own press in Washington to print miniature books, and over the course of the Cold War printed a small library of literature—books that would fit “inside a man’s suit or trouser pocket.” Officials reviewed all the difficulties with the Mouton edition published in the Netherlands, and argued against any outside involvement in a new printing. “In view of the security, legal and technical problems involved, it is recommended that a black miniature edition of Dr. Zhivago be published at headquarters using the
first Feltrinelli text and attributing it to a fictitious publisher.”
By July, at least nine thousand copies of a miniature edition of Doctor Zhivago had been printed “in a one and two volume series,” the latter presumably to make it not so thick, and easier to split up and hide. “The miniature edition was produced at headquarters from the original Russian language text of the Mouton edition,” the agency reported in an internal memo. The CIA attempted to create the illusion that this edition of the novel was published in Paris by ascribing publication to a fictitious entity that was called the Société d’Edition et d’Impression Mondiale. Some of these copies were subsequently distributed by the NTS (National Alliance of Russian Solidarists), the militant Russian émigré group in Germany, another measure to hide the CIA’s involvement, although the agency’s released records don’t mention the organization.
At a press conference in The Hague on November 4, 1958, Yevgeni Garanin, a member of the executive board of the NTS, said his group was planning to print a special bible-stock edition of the novel. Garanin said the NTS had obtained a copy of Doctor Zhivago at the Vatican pavilion, but no decisions had been taken on the size of the print run or where the novel would be printed. He said the group planned to distribute copies among sailors and visitors from Russia. A new, unsigned foreword was written by Boris Filippov, a Washington, D.C., resident and prominent Russian émigré who had previously edited Grani, the NTS journal; Filippov claimed in correspondence with a colleague that he had “released” this edition of Zhivago. Without mentioning the CIA by name, he complained that his introduction was “so maliciously and ignorantly mutilated by the man who gave money for the edition that I removed my name from the edition and the article.”
CIA records state that the miniature books were passed out by “agents who [had] contact with Soviet tourists and officials in the West.” Two thousand copies of this edition were set aside for dissemination to Soviet and East European students at the 1959 World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace and Friendship, which would be held in Vienna.
The festival, which was sponsored by Communist youth organizations, took place between July 26 and August 4. The Kremlin spent millions of dollars on these events, and the Vienna festival was supervised personally by Alexander Shelepin, the head of the KGB. Until 1958, when he moved to the Lubyanka, Shelepin was the vice president of the International Union of Students, a prime mover behind the festival. After becoming head of the KGB, Shelepin kept his position at the International Union of Students for another year so he could supervise events in Vienna, which attracted thousands of young people from across the world. The Soviet Union underwrote the attendance of delegates from the developing world. Because it was the first such festival held in the West, it was also the target of efforts covertly orchestrated by the CIA to disrupt the proceedings—or as the agency’s young provocateurs preferred to call the jamboree, “a tool for the advancement of world communism.” Half of the Northern Hemisphere was Communist and the superpowers increasingly fought for the allegiance of Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians.
The CIA created another front organization, the Independent Service for Information (ISI) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to recruit American students to disrupt the festival. The ISI was headed by Gloria Steinem, a recent graduate, who was made aware of the CIA’s role when she asked about the organization’s funding. When the CIA’s involvement was revealed in 1967, Steinem said she found the CIA officers with whom she worked “liberal and farsighted and open to an exchange of ideas. I never felt I was being dictated to at all.…
“The CIA was the only one with enough guts and foresight to see that youth and student affairs were important,” said Steinem, who said no member of the ISI delegation passed information to the agency. “They wanted to do what we wanted to do—present a healthy, diverse view of the United States.”
The ISI set up a news bureau to feed information to Western correspondents who were refused entry to the festival and smuggled copies of an unsanctioned newspaper into event venues. Newspapers published in several languages were brought in at night and placed in the toilets. The festival grounds were guarded by a security force that checked credentials and patrolled for interlopers. Hotel porters were paid to slip newspapers under the doors of senior officials attending the festival.
Much of the group’s activities took the form of student high jinks. Zbigniew Brzezinski, later President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, tried to sow discord by bumping into Russian delegates and then in a thick Polish accent telling them in Russian, “Out of my way, Russian pig!” Brzezinski, Walter Pincus—later a national security correspondent at The Washington Post—and one of Brzezinski’s students at Harvard hid on a rooftop over Vienna’s Rathausplatz just as the festival’s closing ceremony was about to begin below. The three men hung Hungarian and Algerian flags with the centers cut out in a somewhat strained attempt to equate communism with colonialism and express solidarity with the movements against both. They also hung two white bedsheets with the words Peace and Freedom spelled vertically and in German. The three used a plank to escape onto another rooftop and away from the festival’s security personnel, who dimmed the lights over the square and raced toward the roof to tear down the flags and banners. Pincus later described the ISI’s shenanigans in Vienna as “a college weekend with Russians.” At the time, however, it all seemed very important. “I suppose this was my small world equivalent of going off to join the Spanish Revolution,” Steinem told her aunt and uncle in a letter.
There was a significant effort to distribute books in Vienna—about 30,000 in fourteen languages, including 1984, Animal Farm, The God That Failed, and Doctor Zhivago. The goal was “to expose delegates from the Soviet orbit to revisionist writing” and to “supply the delegates from uncommitted areas with exposés of ideas competing with Communism.” The books were handed out from kiosks and sold at discounted prices at bookstores around town. Young activists from the West noted that these locations “were under observation by communist agents.” The scrutiny in and around the festival grounds was so intense that teams of young people followed sightseeing delegates so they could hand out books at locations such as museums where the minders were not able to exercise as much control. Alexei Adzhubei, Khrushchev’s son-in-law and the editor of Izvestiya, as well as the Soviet ambassador to Austria, “complained bitterly” about ISI’s projects in Vienna.
Plans for a Vienna book program were created by Samuel Walker, the former editor of the CIA-funded Free Europe Press, and C. D. Jackson, a Time-Life executive who previously had served as an adviser to the Eisenhower administration on psychological warfare. Walker, with the blessing of the “friends,” as he called the CIA, set up a dummy company in New York, the Publications Development Corporation, to target the Vienna youth festival with books. Overall responsibility for getting books into the hands of the delegates was mostly left to Austrian allies of the effort. When one of Jackson’s European partners, Klaus Dohrn, a Time-Life executive in Zurich, worried that “special efforts … will have to be made to secure the original Russian text of Dr. Zhivago,” Jackson replied: “Don’t worry about the ‘Dr. Zhivago’ text. We have the authentic one, and that is the one that will be used.”
Apart from a Russian edition, plans also called for Doctor Zhivago to be distributed in Polish, German, Czech, Hungarian, and Chinese at the festival.
The novel had been published in Taiwan in Chinese in 1958 and serialized in Chinese by two newspapers in Hong Kong late the same year. Reaction to the novel in the Chinese press was hostile and in the periodical World Literature, Zang Kejia, the managing secretary of the Chinese Writers Association, said Doctor Zhivago was an ulcer on the Soviet Union. At the Vienna festival, the four-hundred-strong Chinese delegation was even more cocooned than their Eastern European comrades; delegates were instructed not to communicate with the Westerners they encountered, even the waiters who served their meals. And a report by a group of Polish anti-festival act
ivists found the Chinese, unlike other delegations from Communist countries, to be “absolutely uncommunicative.” The Free Europe Committee flew in fifty copies of Doctor Zhivago from Hong Kong for distribution.
The New York Times reported that some members of the Soviet delegation “evinced a great curiosity about Mr. Pasternak’s novel, which is available here.” Occasionally it was not only available but unavoidable. The Soviet delegation of students and performers arrived in a sweltering Vienna from Budapest on forty buses; among the Soviet visitors was the young ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Crowds of Russian émigrés swarmed the Soviet convoy when it entered the city and tossed copies of the CIA miniature edition of Doctor Zhivago through the open windows of the buses.
Pasternak’s novel was the book most in demand among many of the delegations, and copies of it and other novels were handed out in bags from Vienna department stores to disguise the contents; in the darkness of movie theaters; and at a changing roster of pickup points, the locations of which were circulated by word of mouth. For the trip home, delegates tucked books inside camping equipment, stage sets, film cans, and other hiding places.
None of the secret police accompanying the delegations were fooled. When the Polish students were set to return home, one of the group’s leaders warned there would be a thorough search at the border, and it was best to turn in any illicit books before departure. When he got almost no response, he compromised and said, “Only Dr. Zhivago should be given up.”
One Soviet visitor recalled returning to his bus and finding the cabin covered with pocket editions of Doctor Zhivago. “None of us, of course, had read the book but we feared it,” he said. Soviet students were watched by the KGB, who fooled no one when they described themselves as “researchers.” The Soviet “researchers” proved more tolerant than might have been expected. “Take it, read it,” they said, “but by no means bring it home.”
