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

by Peter Finn

  “God marks the path of the elect with thorns, and Pasternak was picked out and marked by God!”

  “Glory to Pasternak!”

  “The poet was killed!” someone cried, and the crowd responded, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

  One of the Litfond officials yelled, “The meeting is over; there will be no more speeches!”

  A copy of a prayer for the dead was placed on Pasternak’s forehead by his longtime housekeeper, and the lid was hammered shut. There were more cries as the coffin was lowered and the first thuds of dirt hit the wood—“faint, muffled and terrifying.”

  The sky clouded over. Most of the crowd quickly dispersed but about fifty young people stayed at the grave, reciting Pasternak’s poetry. They were still there when the sun began to set—“the voice now of one, now another, rising and falling in an eloquent singsong.” The KGB decided not to interfere, but the Central Committee later told the Ministry of Culture and the Union of Soviet Writers to pay attention to the education of students because “some of them (and their number is trifling) have been poisoned with unhealthy, oppositional ideas and are trying to position Pasternak as a great artist and writer who was not understood by his epoch.”

  Through the long, exhausting day, Lydia Chukovskaya, despite her sorrow, had a “strange feeling of triumph, of victory.

  “The victory of what? I don’t know. Maybe of his poetry. Of Russian poetry?” she wondered. “Of our unbreakable bond with him?”

  Chapter 16

  “It’s too late for me to express regret that the book wasn’t published.”

  Ivinskaya was arrested in Peredelkino on August 16. It was dusk, and she was drinking tea with her mother and stepfather when several men came through the garden gate. “You were expecting us to come, of course, weren’t you?” said one of the KGB officers, pink-faced and smiling with satisfaction. “You didn’t imagine, did you, that your criminal activities would go unpunished?”

  Over the previous eighteen months, the secret police had been watching various foreigners bring money into the country for Pasternak—and Ivinskaya was charged with illegal currency trading. While her arrest was at first kept secret, the authorities eventually decided to scapegoat her in a crude attempt to somehow reclaim the early Pasternak, not the author of Doctor Zhivago, as a great Soviet writer. Pasternak, according to Surkov, had been misled by an “adventuress who got him to write Doctor Zhivago and then to send it abroad, so that she could enrich herself.”

  In the last year of his life, Pasternak was a rich man, but control of his fortune lay frustratingly beyond his reach. He authorized Feltrinelli to give $100,000 from his royalties to D’Angelo after the Italian had written to Pasternak to tell him he had “reliable” friends who could carry cash into the Soviet Union.

  Pasternak was wary at first: “Olyusha, where should we leave all that money?”

  “Well, in that suitcase over there!” replied Ivinskaya.

  Feltrinelli transferred the money to D’Angelo from an account in the tax haven of Liechtenstein in March 1960. D’Angelo immediately began purchasing rubles in Western Europe and then arranging for Italian friends to smuggle the currency into the Soviet Union and pass it secretly to Pasternak via Ivinskaya or her daughter. D’Angelo described himself as “running” an “operation” with his own security protocols.

  The Italian, however, was no match for the KGB.

  The secret police watched as Giuseppe Garritano, a Moscow correspondent for the Italian Communist newspaper L’Unità, arranged the transfer of a large sum of rubles that D’Angelo had purchased. In March 1960, Garritano’s wife, Mirella, called Ivinskaya’s city apartment, which was almost certainly bugged and under close surveillance, and asked her to come to the post office and collect some books for Pasternak. Ivinskaya was laid up with a sprained leg and Pasternak was reluctant to meet an unknown foreigner. They agreed to send Ivinskaya’s daughter, Irina, who took her younger brother with her. They were handed a shabby black suitcase and when it was opened back in the apartment, Ivinskaya and Pasternak “gasped with astonishment: instead of books, it contained bundles of Soviet banknotes in wrappers, all neatly stacked together, row upon row of them.”

  Pasternak gave Ivinskaya one bundle and took the suitcase to Peredelkino.

  The Italians agreed to take back some documents to Feltrinelli. Garritano and his wife lost the papers while vacationing in the Caucasus, including a signed instruction that gave Ivinskaya control over Pasternak’s royalties. When she noticed the papers were gone, Mirella Garritano thought the documents might have fallen out of her bag during a rainstorm. Her husband suspected they were being watched and the documents were stolen when she put her bag down at a party. In August, Ivinskaya separately forwarded to Feltrinelli a power of attorney that Pasternak had signed in December 1956 and gave her “power to carry out all tasks related to the publication of the novel Doctor Zhivago.” But this did not provide any broad authority to manage his posthumous affairs.

  The Garritanos’ carelessness made for a very complicating loss. Pasternak left no will, and often unseemly struggles for control over various parts of his legacy began almost immediately after his death and were litigated by friends and family well into the 1990s.

  In late 1959, Feltrinelli had sent Pasternak a new contract, which gave the Milan publisher control over the film rights for Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak’s other writings, and also sidelined de Proyart as the author’s second legally sanctioned adviser in the West. Hesitant about offending his French friend, Pasternak procrastinated for several months. Pressed by both Ivinskaya and the German journalist Heinz Schewe, Feltrinelli’s trusted courier to Moscow, Pasternak eventually signed the contract in April 1960.

  In the week after the funeral, Ivinskaya wrote to Feltrinelli and after mentioning her “terrible sorrow” told him that they urgently had to talk about practical matters. “In April, when Boris wanted to dedicate himself exclusively to his drama and already felt weak, he wrote me a power of attorney for you,” she said, referring to the material she had entrusted to the Garritanos. “It says that he wishes my signature to be as valid as his own whether it concerns financial agreements or any other sort of document.” She wrote that D’Angelo’s friends would pass it along. She also promised to support Feltrinelli in any conflict with Pasternak’s family, including his sisters in England. “The Pasternak family has no claim to the publishing rights,” Ivinskaya wrote. “The last power of attorney is the agreement I just informed you about.”

  Feltrinelli wrote back to Ivinskaya to tell her that he thought D’Angelo’s methods “were too dangerous” and she should trust only the German correspondent. In his own effort at spycraft, Feltrinelli enclosed half of a thousand-lira banknote and told Ivinskaya that in the absence of Schewe she should deal with the person who could produce the other half of the bill. Ivinskaya thought the banknote was something out of a “bad thriller,” and she would pay a steep price for possessing it.

  Ivinskaya said she hadn’t had a “quiet moment” since she learned the documents were gone and feared what would happen if they fell into the wrong hands. “My dear, dear Giangiacomo. Let’s hope that the most horrible thing will not happen and that I will keep my liberty, for as long as it takes.”

  Following the death of the author, Feltrinelli hoped that Ivinskaya could continue to entrust him with Pasternak’s affairs. The publisher had no previous contact with Pasternak’s wife and children, and his adviser Schewe was predisposed to Ivinskaya, not the widow, Zinaida. “I will always make sure that a substantial part of the profits is left for you and Irina,” Feltrinelli promised Ivinskaya. He also told her that his contracts with Pasternak “must never end up in the hands of the authorities or the Pasternak family.”

  Excluding Pasternak’s family was a venal suggestion, and one that would be exploited by the Soviet Union. But it didn’t entirely reflect Feltrinelli’s position. He accepted Ivinskaya as Pasternak’s executor but told her “not to get involved in a battle i
n Moscow” and to be “generous with money matters,” for there could be “dangerous enemies.”

  Unaware of Feltrinelli’s misgivings, D’Angelo continued with his own plans. In July, he gave a second, large installment of cash to another Italian couple, the Benedettis, who drove to Moscow from Berlin in a Volkswagen Beetle. The money was hidden in the paneling of the car. When they arrived in Moscow, the couple carried the cash to Ivinskaya’s apartment in a large rucksack. The Benedettis brought in 500,000 rubles, which was worth about $125,000 at the official exchange rate, but could be acquired for much less, about $50,000, on the gray market in Western Europe.

  Ivinskaya tried to refuse the money after her daughter sensed the danger in accepting it. But the Benedettis had come too far not to complete their mission. “You have no right to refuse it,” they said. “This is a personal debt.” Ivinskaya’s caution was short-lived. She bought a motorcycle for her son and, on the day of her arrest, a polished wardrobe, part of a shopping spree certain to draw attention to a woman with no visible income. Some of the hasty spending may have been caused by a currency reform that would have required Soviet citizens to turn in old rubles for new by the end of the year. The Pasternaks were also involved in some head-turning spending. In April, shortly before his death, Pasternak bought a new car, a Volga, for 45,000 rubles, a strikingly big-ticket cash purchase for an author who had ostensibly lost a great deal of income after the Nobel Prize controversy.

  The KGB began to pressure Ivinskaya almost immediately after Pasternak’s funeral. She was visited by a “thick-set man with black eyes” who produced the red identity card of a KGB agent and demanded the manuscript of Pasternak’s work in progress, The Blind Beauty. Ivinskaya was told that unless she produced the original copy she would be “taken to a place that will certainly be more traumatic.” Ivinskaya handed it over, but soon after arranged for Schewe to get another copy of the play out of the country. Feltrinelli promised not to publish it without Ivinskaya’s permission.

  The secret police also began to isolate Ivinskaya’s family. Irina was engaged to a French student, Georges Nivat. But before the August 20 wedding he fell ill with a mysterious illness. He was hospitalized after he broke out in blisters over much of his body and started running a high temperature. He recovered but his visa was not renewed and he was forced to fly home to France on August 10. All pleas on his behalf, including directly to Khrushchev from the French ambassador to the Soviet Union, were ignored. In retrospect, Irina considered the possibility that Nivat’s contagious disease and hospitalization were not accidental, but organized to stop the marriage.

  Day-to-day harassment of Ivinskaya and her family was stepped up. “Strange groups of young people” hung around outside the Moscow apartment, and when Olga and her daughter went out they were shadowed by men who made no effort to hide themselves—repeating a tactic from the days of the Nobel Prize controversy.

  On August 16, the day of Ivinskaya’s arrest, her rental home in Peredelkino and her apartment in Moscow were searched—as were the homes of some of her friends. She had hidden the remaining money as well as some of Pasternak’s papers in a suitcase in a neighbor’s house, where it was found. Pasternak’s house was also searched by two agents, who said they were acting on information from Ivinskaya that Pasternak had received one hundred pairs of boots and fifty coats from abroad, as well as cash. The lead about the clothing was patently false, and it’s doubtful there was any such “tip” from Ivinskaya. The search was probably focused on finding money and documents.

  Sandwiched between two agents, Ivinskaya was driven to the Lubyanka—KGB headquarters—where she had been held in 1949.

  “I was overcome by a peculiar feeling of indifference,” she recalled. “Now that Borya was in his grave, perhaps it was just as well that I had been plucked out of the hopeless dead-end of my existence.”

  The twenty-two-year-old Irina was arrested on September 5. She was interrogated every day but never for more than two hours. “After all, you are a teeny-weeny criminal,” her investigator said.

  Feltrinelli learned of Ivinskaya’s arrest in early September. “We have read all of your letters at once, as soon as we came home from vacation, and are absolutely appalled,” he wrote to Schewe. “The sequence of events—with the culmination in your last letter—is truly awful. This, unfortunately, is due to the carelessness and temporary mistrust in us of our lady friend who, against all cautions and warnings, took advantage of the other party whose goals are very shady.” He was apparently referring to D’Angelo’s couriers.

  “As for D’Angelo, I am really in the dark,” he continued. “We are dealing here either with a provocateur or an idiot.”

  At first the mother and daughter were held in secret; there was no announcement of their arrest. D’Angelo and his wife visited Moscow in September, unaware of what had happened. They checked in at the Hotel Ukraine, the Stalinist skyscraper near their old apartment by the Moscow River. When he called Ivinskaya, a strange female voice answered and said she wasn’t home. The following day when D’Angelo called back, someone that he believed to be Irina told him, “Mom’s on vacation in the south and she won’t be back until the end of the month.”

  “Well, maybe we could get together with just you and Mitya,” said D’Angelo.

  The fake Irina eventually agreed that they could come over, but when they did, only Mitya, Ivinskaya’s son, was at home. He said his sister was really sorry but “she had to leave rather suddenly. She had a chance to get a ride with friends who are driving to the south and she wants to go visit our mother.”

  The boy seemed nervous and uncomfortable. The conversation was being monitored. D’Angelo and his wife withdrew.

  At the Lubyanka, Ivinskaya was again subjected to daily interrogations. At one point, she was questioned by Vadim Tikunov, the deputy chairman of the KGB, whose involvement signaled the importance the authorities attached to the case. Ivinskaya described him as consisting of three spheres: “his backside, his belly and his head.”

  When Ivinskaya was brought before Tikunov, a copy of Doctor Zhivago lay on his desk, along with some of Pasternak’s letters to her.

  “You disguised it very well,” he said, “but we know perfectly well that the novel was written not by Pasternak but by you. Look, he says so himself.”

  Tikunov quoted from one of Pasternak’s letters to Ivinskaya: “It was you who did it all, Olyusha! Nobody knows that it was you who did it all—you guided my hand and stood behind me, all of it I owe to you.”

  “You have probably never loved a woman,” said Ivinskaya, “so you don’t know what it means, and the sort of things people think and write at such a time.”

  Ivinskaya was indicted on November 10, 1960.

  The trial began and ended on December 7, a day of driving sleet. Ivinskaya and her daughter were brought to Moscow City Court on Kalanchevskaya Street in Black Marias. They were overjoyed to see each other and “could not stop talking.”

  There were no witnesses, family, or press in the courtroom—only the judge, lawyers, court staff, and investigators. Some of Irina’s friends had learned of the trial, probably from the defense attorneys, and they stood at the gates of the courthouse to wave to the women as they were driven in.

  The prosecutor told the court that the correspondence between Ivinskaya and Feltrinelli convinced him that the novel was sent abroad by Olga, although Pasternak had also “sold himself to the Western warmongers.” The prosecutor said he was uncertain who had actually written the novel—Pasternak or Ivinskaya—but the point was moot as the charges were limited to currency smuggling and trading. The half of Feltrinelli’s thousand-lira note was produced in court, and the roster of couriers was detailed along with the amounts of money they smuggled in.

  Ivinskaya’s lawyers argued that Ivinskaya and her daughter had smuggled nothing and had never exchanged foreign currency for rubles. Moreover, they said, Feltrinelli and his emissaries were following Pasternak’s instructions. And the lawyer
s questioned why couriers who were under surveillance were never arrested.

  There was never any doubt about the verdict, but when the length of the sentence was announced, there was utter bewilderment at its severity—eight years forced labor for Ivinskaya, three years for Irina.

  In January, the two women were sent by train to a camp in Taishet, Siberia, nearly three thousand miles east of Moscow. The nearest city was Krasnoyarsk. Surrounded by common criminals and nuns who sang about Christ, they were kept in cages inside the train coaches on the journey east. The cold was terrible and Irina was wearing only a light spring coat. The final leg of the trip was a forced walk at night in temperatures of minus twenty-five degrees Celsius. Ivinskaya found it “unbearable for Muscovites like [her and Irina] who were quite unused to such bitter cold.”

  The regime at the camp, a facility for women convicted of political offenses, proved not to be too harsh. The barracks were warm, there was a banya (sauna), and parcels from Moscow arrived without difficulty. Olga and Irina were nicknamed the “Pasternachkis” by the other inmates. But their stay was short-lived. While they were being transported to the camp in Taishet, the Gulag—the system of forced-labor camps that began under Stalin—was officially abolished. After several weeks, the women were sent back west to Potma—the camp where Ivinskaya had served her time between 1950 and 1953 and part of the penitentiary system.

  Word about the arrest and trial seeped out slowly. At first a number of Western writers and academics, including Graham Greene, François Mauriac, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Bertrand Russell, wrote quiet appeals to the Soviet authorities, which were ignored. Russell, an elderly philosopher who had campaigned hard for unilateral nuclear disarmament, told Khrushchev in a letter that the Soviet persecution of Olga and Irina “was the sort of thing that made my campaign for better relations with Russia extremely difficult.”

  The news broke publicly January 18. The New York Times described the sentence as a “pure act of revenge” against “Boris Pasternak’s close collaborator and intimate friend, who inspired the novel ‘Doctor Zhivago’ and served as the model for its heroine, Larisa.”