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

by Peter Finn

  A deal took several years to reach—so long that the Soviets, on their visits to Milan, “learned to wind spaghetti around their forks,” in the words of Feltrinelli’s son. Schewe reported that Ivinskaya was “bellicose and uncompromising as ever” and reluctant to share the estate, although she had no legal standing to challenge any agreement. She received the equivalent of $24,000 in rubles in acknowledgment of her role as Pasternak’s “faithful companion” when a final settlement was reached in 1970.

  By that year, Feltrinelli’s political passions were beginning to consume him. After he broke with the Italian Communist Party, he felt like he “no longer believed in anything. No type of commitment either ideological or political.” But two visits to Cuba in 1964 and 1965, and long discussions with Fidel Castro, whose memoirs he hoped to publish, had a rejuvenating effect on Feltrinelli. Here was a political experiment he could admire. The Cold War adversaries seemed hopelessly corrupt to him as the 1960s progressed—the Americans were killing in Vietnam and Soviet tanks were smothering the Prague Spring. In Italy, Feltrinelli feared a Fascist coup. The publisher gradually and then completely immersed himself in a radical, anti-imperialist struggle, and his views hardened to the point that he advocated “the use of systematic and progressive counter-violence” to ensure the success of the Italian working class. For the Italian secret services, he was fast becoming an enemy of the state. When bombs exploded in Milan at the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricultura, killing sixteen and injuring eighty-four, Feltrinelli’s name was floated as a suspect by the police. He could have fought the accusation, but instead went underground—seeking “untraceability,” as he called it. “It is the only condition that allows me to serve the cause of socialism,” he said in a letter to his staff. He moved from place to place between Italy, Switzerland, France, and Austria. He assumed new identities. He was unsuited to a life on the run and seemed increasingly haggard and disoriented. “He’s lost,” his wife, Inge Schönthal Feltrinelli, wrote in her diary. When she met him in Innsbruck in April 1970, she failed to recognize him. “He looked like a tramp.” A year later, when the Bolivian consul in Hamburg—a regime thug—was assassinated, the gun was traced to Feltrinelli. He was not involved in the conspiracy but probably met the assassin through his Latin American contacts and gave her the gun—a .38 Colt Cobra—on the Côte d’Azur. There was now no way back. He was a revolutionary outlaw. He wrote a long letter to the Red Brigades, a violent Marxist-Leninist paramilitary group, suggesting that they work together on “a political, strategic and tactical platform.” Later in 1971, he wrote a new manifesto, Class Struggle or Class War?—a call for the revolutionary movement to confront, wear down, and disarm the political and military power of its adversary.

  On March 15, 1972, the body of a man was found under a high-voltage electricity pylon in a suburb of Milan. It was Feltrinelli. He was killed when the bomb he and some co-conspirators planned to use to cause a power cut went off prematurely. “Did the explosion happen because of a sharp movement up on the crossbar (the fabric of the pocket pressing against the timer, the pin making contact) or did someone set the time with minutes instead of hours?” Feltrinelli’s son Carlo asked in his memoir of his father. “The answer might close the story, but it would not resolve what really matters.”

  In 1988 and 1989, as he rode the subway in Moscow, the journalist David Remnick was arrested by an incredible sight: “ordinary people reading Pasternak in their sky-blue copies of Novy Mir.” The intelligentsia had long since read Doctor Zhivago and the other banned works of seven decades of censorship. Now it was the turn of ordinary people to experience the excitement of what for so long had been forbidden.

  Official attitudes toward Pasternak began to soften in the early 1980s—before the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader and his policy of glasnost allowed the publication of banned works. Pasternak’s former protégés, including the poets Voznesensky and Yevtushenko, began to agitate for the publication of Doctor Zhivago. Voznesensky described publication as a litmus test of the times, an act necessary to lance the past. “It will be a triumph over the witch hunt against anti-Sovietism,” he said.

  “You destroy the black magic myth,” he continued. “The lie against Pasternak will be dead. It will be a revolution.”

  The magazine Ogonyok (Little Flame) published some short excerpts from Doctor Zhivago in December 1987. From January to April 1988, Novy Mir, the journal that first rejected Doctor Zhivago, serialized the novel and Soviet readers could finally and openly read Pasternak’s work in full. A first legal Russian edition appeared the following year and the copyright line read: “Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore Milano.”

  At the V. I. Lenin State Library, which was later renamed the Russian State Library, a copy of the CIA edition of Doctor Zhivago that had been hidden away since 1959 was transferred out of the Spetskhran (Special Collections) and made available to the public, albeit on a controlled basis because the edition is considered very precious. In libraries across Russia, thousands of titles and “a wealth of noncommunist philosophy, political science, history, and economics and the treasure trove of Russian émigré memoirs and literature” emerged from the hidden stacks.

  Olga Carlisle, who had interviewed Pasternak shortly before his death, was in Moscow at the time Doctor Zhivago began to appear. On a spring evening on Gorky Street, she and a friend saw a line of two or three hundred people. Carlisle’s companion, a Muscovite, joined the queue out of habit before knowing what was for sale, an old Soviet instinct in case some rare consumer good or food had made it to the threadbare shelves of the city’s stores. The line ended at a bookstore and the crowd, they soon learned, was expecting a shipment of copies of Doctor Zhivago the following morning.

  Also in 1989, the Swedish Academy invited Yevgeny Pasternak, who along with his wife, Yelena, had become the tireless compiler and editor of Boris Pasternak’s complete works, to come to Stockholm. In a brief ceremony in the academy’s great hall on December 9, Sture Allén, the permanent secretary, read the telegrams Pasternak had sent accepting and then rejecting the Nobel Prize in October 1958. Yevgeny was overcome with emotion when he stepped forward and on behalf of his father accepted the gold medal for the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature.

  Afterword

  A successful stunt, don’t you think?” said the Dutch intelligence officer C. C. (Kees) van den Heuvel, who worked with the CIA on the first printing of Doctor Zhivago.

  There was something of the caper about the Zhivago operation and, more generally, the books program. Émigrés, priests, athletes, students, businessmen, tourists, soldiers, musicians, and diplomats—they all carried books across the Iron Curtain and into the Soviet Union. Books were sent to Russian prisoners of war in Afghanistan, foisted on Russian truck drivers in Iran, and offered to Russian sailors in the Canary Islands, as well being pressed into the hands of visitors to the Vatican pavilion in Brussels and the World Youth Festival in Vienna.

  The Zhivago operation left such an impression on CIA officer Walter Cini and his Dutch colleague Joop van der Wilden that they were still talking about it in the 1990s, and discussing the possibility of opening a museum dedicated to Pasternak. The CIA had genuinely lofty ambitions for the vast library of books it spirited east. In one of its only claims for its covert intellectual campaign ever made public, the agency said the books program was “demonstrably effective” and “can inferentially be said to influence attitudes and reinforce predispositions toward intellectual and cultural freedom, and dissatisfaction with its absence.”

  Even after many of the agency’s activities in the cultural Cold War were disclosed in the press in the late 1960s, forcing the agency to halt some of its political warfare operations, the secret distribution of books remained largely unexposed and continued until late 1991. From the birth of the books program in the 1950s until the fall of the USSR, the CIA distributed 10 million books and periodicals in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Either CIA funds went to small publishers w
ho smuggled books or the agency ran its own one-off operations, as in the case of Doctor Zhivago. In the program’s final years, when Gorbachev was in power, at least 165,000 books were sent to the Soviet Union annually. Not just fiction was smuggled in pockets and suitcases, but “dictionaries and books on language, art and architecture, religion and philosophy, economics, management, and farming, history and memoirs, and catalogues.”

  Some of this extraordinary story has come out, piecemeal, in revelations by former employees of CIA-sponsored organizations and in the work of scholars such as Alfred A. Reisch, who have put together a history of the programs in Eastern Europe from records in universities and private hands. “Millions of people,” he concluded, “were affected one way or another by the book project without ever hearing about its existence.” For these individuals, the books program meant a well-thumbed piece of literature or history received in secret from a trusted friend and, in turn, passed on to another.

  Much of the official record of this effort, including all the files of the Bedford Publishing Company, which targeted the Soviet Union, remains classified. There are reasons to fear that some of the agency’s—and the public’s—rich inheritance no longer exists. A former CIA officer told the authors that the agency for a long time had kept a collection of its miniature bible-stock publications, but many of the books were destroyed to make room for other material.

  The battle over the publication of Doctor Zhivago was one of the first efforts by the CIA to leverage books as instruments of political warfare. Those words can seem distasteful and cynical, and critics of the CIA’s role in the cultural Cold War view the agency’s secrecy as inherently immoral and corrupting. But the CIA and its contractors were certain of the nobility of their efforts, and that in the face of an authoritarian power with its own propaganda machine, a resort to secrecy was unavoidable. All these years later, in an age of terror, drones, and targeted killing, the CIA’s faith—and the Soviet Union’s faith—in the power of literature to transform society seem almost quaint.

  The global standing of the Soviet Union was bruised by its treatment of Pasternak. “We caused much harm to the Soviet Union,” wrote Khrushchev, who said he was “truly sorry for the way [he] behaved toward Pasternak.” Khrushchev was a virtual prisoner in his own home when he dictated his memoirs, and in an irony that would surely have brought a small smile to Pasternak’s face, he allowed the tapes to be spirited out of the Soviet Union and published in the West.

  It was a path that many others, following Pasternak’s example, would take. He became a model for a line of courageous Soviet writers who followed his example of publishing abroad. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn may be the most prominent example. Their number also included Sinyavsky and Daniel, the two young men who carried the lid of Pasternak’s coffin, and another Russian Nobel Prize winner, the poet Joseph Brodsky.

  In the wake of Pasternak’s death, a new community emerged that strived for the same “intellectual and artistic emancipation as the dead poet had,” wrote the historian Vladislav Zubok. “And they viewed themselves as the descendants of the great cultural and moral tradition that Pasternak, his protagonist Yuri Zhivago, and his milieu embodied. Thus, they were Zhivago’s children, in a spiritual sense.”

  Brodsky said that, beginning with Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak caused a wave of conversions to Russian Orthodoxy, especially among the Jewish intelligentsia. “If you belong to Russian culture and you think in its categories, you know perfectly well that this culture is nursed by Orthodoxy,” he said. “That’s why you turn to the Orthodox Church. Let alone that it is a form of opposition.”

  Pasternak’s grave became a pilgrimage site, a place to pay homage “to all hunted and tormented poets,” as one poet described his visits to Peredelkino in the 1970s. The young people who stayed late reciting Pasternak’s poetry on the day of his burial kept coming back, and year after year, new faces and generations continued to recite the lines from his poem “Hamlet”:

  Yet the order of the acts is planned

  And the end of the way inescapable.

  I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees’ hypocrisy.

  To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.

  Acknowledgments

  We have been helped by many very generous people who made this book possible. Thank you.

  Paul Koedijk introduced us and started our conversation about Doctor Zhivago, exchanges that led to our decision to write this book together. Raphael Sagalyn, our literary agent, shepherded us into the world of publishing. Kris Puopolo, our editor, believed in this story from the first moment.

  We thank Sonny Mehta, the editor in chief of Knopf Doubleday, and Dan Frank, the editorial director of Pantheon Books, for taking us into the same house that published Doctor Zhivago in the United States in 1958; Daniel Meyer of Doubleday; and Ellie Steel and Matthew Broughton at Harvill Secker in London.

  Ken Kalfus, Patrick Farrelly, Kate O’Callaghan, and Paul Koedijk gave us early and important feedback.

  We want to single out Natasha Abbakumova of The Washington Post’s Moscow bureau, whose assistance was extraordinary.

  A number of people were critical to our understanding of this story. Carlo Feltrinelli and Inge Schönthal-Feltrinelli at Doctor Zhivago’s first home in Milan; Sergio D’Angelo in Viterbo; the late Yevgeni Pasternak; Natalya Pasternak, Yelena Chukovskaya, and Dmitri Chukovsky in Moscow; Irina Kozovoi (Yemelyanova) and Jacqueline de Proyart in Paris (1998); Roman Bernaut and Alexis Bernaut in Reclos, France; Gerd Ruge in Munich; and Megan Morrow in San Francisco.

  We are grateful for the support of Joe Lambert, Mary Wilson, Bruce Barkan, Debbie Lebo, Marie Harf, and Preston Golson at the CIA, and we thank all the officers who served in the CIA’s Historical Collections Division. After being greeted with a polite no when we first asked about the agency’s Zhivago papers, Bruce van Vorst, former CIA officer and journalist, helped through various intermediaries to bring our project to the attention of the right people at the agency. Former CIA officers Burton Gerber and Benjamin Fischer provided insights along the way. We were also helped by Dirk Engelen, in-house historian at the Dutch intelligence services, the AIVD, formerly the BVD. The assistance of the late BVD officer C. C. (Kees) van den Heuvel was invaluable as was that of former MI6 officer Rachel van der Wilden, the widow of BVD officer Joop van der Wilden. Other former CIA officers who assisted us did not wish to be identified.

  We have been aided by librarians and researchers across the United States and Europe. Our thanks to: Ron Basich, who conducted research at the Hoover Institution Archives; Janet Crayne and Kate Hutchens at the University of Michigan Library; Valoise Armstrong at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Museum and Library; David A. Langbart and Miriam Kleiman at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; Tanya Chebotarev at Columbia University’s Bakhmeteff Archive; Koos Couvée Jr., who conducted research at the National Archives in London; Jan Paul Hinrichs, Joke Bakker, Bryan Beemer at Leiden University Library; Willeke Tijssen at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam; Professor Gustaaf Janssens at the Archive of the Royal Palace in Brussels; Patricia Quaghebeur of the KADOC (Documentation and Research Centre for Religion, Culture and Society) in Leuven, Belgium; Johanna Couvée for research in the academic libraries in Brussels; Delfina Boero, Paola Pellegatta, Vladimir Kolupaev at the Fondazione Russia Christiana, Villa Ambiveri in Seriate, Italy; Lars Rydquist at the Nobel Library; Magnus Ljunggren in Stockholm; Elisabet Lind for her warm hospitality in Stockholm; Linda Örtenblad, Odd Zschiedrich, and Ulrika Kjellin for their support at the Swedish Academy; the staff of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF); Yelena Makareki at the Russian State Library in Moscow; Anne Qureshi at the Frankfurter Buchmesse; and Rainer Laabs at Axel Springer AG Unternehmensarchiv in Berlin.

  We would like to say thank you to Svetlana Prudnikova, Volodya Alexandrov, Maria Lipman, and Anna Masterova in Moscow; Shannon Smiley in Berlin; Leigh Turner in London; Theo Maarten van Lint at Oxford Un
iversity; Pieter Claerhout in Ghent; Maghiel van Crevel and Jinhua Wu at Leiden University, and Mark Gamsa at Tel Aviv University.

  In the United States, we would like to acknowledge the help of Denise Donegan, Max Frankel, Edward Lozansky, Gene Sosin, Gloria Donen Sosin, Manon van der Water, Jim Critchlow, Alan Wald, Anton Troianovski, Jack Masey, Ulf and Ingrid Roeller, Ansgar Graw, and the Isaac Patch family.

  In the Netherlands, the late Peter de Ridder was welcoming and helpful. We are grateful to his family and, in particular, his son, Rob de Ridder. We want to thank the late Cornelius van Schooneveld; Dorothy van Schooneveld; Barbara and Edward van der Beek; and the Starink family. Thanks to Roelf van Til for bringing Couvée’s articles about the Zhivago story to a broad Dutch audience on public television in January 1999, and to Bart Jan Spruyt for the introduction to Kees van den Heuvel. Also our thanks to: Brigitte Soethout; Michel Kerres and Edith Loozen; Igor Cornelissen; Rob Hartmans; Elisabeth Spanjer; Kitty van Densen; Han Vermeulen; and Dick Coutinho.

  Peter Finn writes: It has been a privilege to work for the Graham family for eighteen years: I would like to thank Don Graham and Katherine Weymouth for the wonderful professional home they created. Editors at The Washington Post allowed me to take a leave of absence to work on this book. Thanks to Marty Baron, Kevin Merida, Cameron Barr, Anne Kornblut, and Jason Ukman. I’ve worked with many great editors and reporters over the years, including my colleagues in the National Security group, but I am especially grateful to Joby Warrick, David Hoffman, Scott Higham, Jean Mack, Walter Pincus, Robert Kaiser, Anup Kaphle, and Julie Tate for their help and encouragement on this book.