by Peter Finn
I spent my leave at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a wonderful institution that allows the time to think and write. I’m grateful to Peter Reid for getting me in the door, and to the center’s leaders and staff, including Jane Harman, Michael Van Dusen, Robert Litwak, Blair Ruble, Christian Osterman, William Pomeranz, Alison Lyalikov, Janet Spikes, Michelle Kamalich, and Dagne Gizaw. Also thanks to my fellow visiting scholars at the Wilson International Center: Jack Hamilton, Steve Lee Myers, Mark Mazetti, Michael Adler, and Ilan Greenberg. I’m very grateful for A. Ross Johnson’s continuing interest in this project. I was fortunate to be able to work with two wonderful Wilson International Center interns, Chandler Grigg and Emily Olsen, who conducted research at the National Archives and the Library of Congress.
I would like to acknowledge the support of Walter and Stephanie Dorman; John and Sheila Haverkampf; Barry Baskind and Eileen FitzGerald; Joseph FitzGerald Jr.; and the late Joseph and Deirdre FitzGerald.
In Ireland, I want to thank my brothers Greg and Bill, and their families. It’s a great regret that my parents, Bill and Pat, didn’t live to read this book. Also, a tip of the hat to old friends: Jeremy and Mary Crean, and Ronan and Grainne Farrell.
Thanks to Rachel, Liam, David, and Ria Finn, who watched this book take shape with pride and patience. Nora FitzGerald is a partner in everything. (Love you!)
Petra Couvée writes: In Moscow I was fortunate to enjoy the encouragement of Thymen Kouwenaar, cultural counselor at the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the intelligent support of Menno Kraan. The Netherlands Institute in Saint Petersburg provided all sorts of general and technical support. I would like to thank Mila Chevalier, Anna Vyborova, Aai Prins, and Gerard van der Wardt at the Netherlands Institute, Saint Petersburg; my Russian colleagues, especially Vladimir Belousov, at the Lomonosov State University in Moscow, and Irina Mikhailova at the State University of Saint Petersburg; and all my Russian students. Thanks to the Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie), Ingrid Degraeve, and my colleagues and students at the 2013 summer course in Zeist for granting me a leave to finalize the book.
I am continuously grateful to my family and my friends Manon van der Water, Harco Alkema, Kees de Kock, Arie van der Ent, Maarten Mous, Nony Verschoor; Maghiel van Crevel, for being illuminating; and Henk Maier for literature and lifelong loving loyalty. My parents, Koos Couvée Sr. and Paula van Rossen, for being together and each for their own part an inspiration.
A Note on Sources
We have been interested in the Zhivago story for a number of years. Petra Couvée, who now teaches at Saint Petersburg State University, first wrote in 1999 about the role of Dutch intelligence, the BVD, in the secret publication of Doctor Zhivago. One of the BVD’s former senior officers, Kees van den Heuvel, after consulting with his former agency colleagues, told Couvée that the BVD helped arrange a printing of the novel in The Hague at the request of the CIA. This admission was the first semi-official acknowledgment of CIA involvement. Couvée’s findings were published in the Amsterdam literary magazine De Parelduiker (The Pearl Diver). Peter Finn wrote about the theory that the CIA sought to win the Nobel Prize for Pasternak in The Washington Post in 2007 when he was the newspaper’s Moscow bureau chief. That story led us to start communicating about the Zhivago affair after we were introduced by the Dutch Cold War historian and journalist Paul Koedijk.
Eventually we began to consider writing a new history of Doctor Zhivago in the Cold War. We believed this book could not be written unless we were able to clarify exactly what the CIA did or did not do. The CIA had never acknowledged its role in the secret publication of Doctor Zhivago. In 2007, Peter Finn told Yevgeni Pasternak, Boris Pasternak’s son, that he would attempt to obtain any CIA records about the operation. Yevgeni Pasternak was skeptical. He did not live to see the release of any material and, in any case, regarded the whole CIA connection as a distressing and “cheap sensation,” as he told Finn. His father would no doubt have agreed. Pasternak was unhappy about the exploitation of his novel for Cold War propaganda purposes. He never knew about the CIA’s involvement in the secret printing of the novel in Russian; he had reason to believe that it was the work of Russian émigrés, though he knew well that they operated in a murky world that sometimes involved Western intelligence services.
Finn asked the CIA to release any documents that it had on the printing of Doctor Zhivago. The first request was made to the agency’s public affairs office in 2009. We finally obtained the documents in August 2012. The CIA released approximately 135 previously classified internal documents about its involvement in the printing of two Russian-language editions of the book, the hardback edition distributed in Brussels and a paperback edition printed at CIA headquarters the following year. The CIA’s own historians found and reviewed the agency’s documentation and shepherded the internal declassification process. We were able to review these documents before their public release. The CIA placed no conditions on our use of these documents and did not review any section of this book.
The documents reveal a series of blunders that nearly derailed the first printing of the book and led the CIA to make the second printing of the paperback edition an entirely black operation. The CIA plans to publish these documents itself and post them on its website. There are undoubtedly still classified documents in the possession of the CIA that bear on the subject, but a U.S. official said the vast majority of the documents that were found in an internal search of agency records have now been released and those withheld will not affect public understanding of the agency’s operations regarding Doctor Zhivago. A number of documents that were referenced in the released material but were not found are presumed to have been lost, the official said. The CIA did redact most names and those of some allies and institutions in its documents, but through other sources it was possible to identify key actors in the drama. Still secret is the name of the original source who provided the manuscript to the British. The endnotes for chapters 8 and 9 provide details on the reasoning behind all deductions we have made. We hope this release will prompt the CIA to declassify more material on the Cultural Cold War it waged against the Soviet Union, including on the vast books program it underwrote for several decades.
A wealth of new material has appeared since the fall of the Soviet Union, including the Kremlin’s own files and a rich array of memoirs and letters. The authors have drawn on Soviet documents in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), and the files of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which were published in Moscow in 2001 as “A za mnoyu shum pogoni …” Boris Pasternak i Vlast’ Dokumenty: 1956–1972. (Behind Me the Noise of Pursuit: Boris Pasternak and Power. Documents 1956–1972) (referred to in the notes as Pasternak i Vlast’). The Soviet documents in Pasternak i Vlast’ are not available in English, but they have been published in French as Le Dossier de l’affaire Pasternak, Archives du Comité central et du Politburo.
Almost all of Pasternak’s writing, including prose, poems, autobiographical sketches, correspondence, and biographical essays by family and friends, some of it never published in English, can be found in an eleven-volume collection edited by Yevgeni and Yelena Pasternak, his son and daughter-in-law: Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, s prilozheniyami, v odinnadtsati tomakh (Complete Collected Works with Appendices, in 11 Volumes). Volume 11, “Boris Pasternak remembered by his contemporaries,” is a collection of memoirs and excerpts from memoirs; for this reason we cite the authors of these memoirs when referencing Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii in the bibliography. In the notes and bibliography, we have directed readers to an English translation of material cited, when available, and to English-language books or articles.
The correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Giangiacomo Feltrinelli has been published by Yelena and Yevgeni Pasternak in Kontinent, 2001, nos. 107 and 108, and can be read in English in Feltrinelli: A Story of Riches, Revolution and Violent Death, Carlo Feltrinelli’s memoir of his father, and in Paolo M
ancosu, Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak’s Masterpiece.
We have also been able to interview a number of participants and contemporaneous witnesses in the drama, and some of their relatives or descendants, including Yevgeni Pasternak, Carlo Feltrinelli, Sergio D’Angelo, Andrei Voznesensky, Irina Yemelyanova, Yelena Chukovskaya, Dmitri Chukovsky, Gerd Ruge, Max Frankel, Walter Pincus, Roman Bernaut, Peter de Ridder, Rachel van der Wilden, Kees van den Heuvel, Cornelis H. van Schooneveld, and Jacqueline de Proyart. Some of these interviews took place before we planned on writing this book when we were working on shorter articles about various aspects of the Zhivago Affair.
We have also drawn on the great number of memoirs of the era, many of which appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union. Carlo Feltrinelli allowed us to hold and peruse the Doctor Zhivago manuscript carried out by D’Angelo—a visceral and electrifying moment for us. Megan Morrow, the daughter of the New York publisher Felix Morrow, gave us the relevant portions of her father’s still-sealed oral history, which describes his work for the CIA on Doctor Zhivago; his oral testimony is held at Columbia University. Peter de Ridder, one of Mouton’s publishers, gave his consent to the General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD), the successor to the BVD, to turn over any files they held on him to us. We received the files in September 2009; the documents simply record his travel to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as a representative of Mouton.
We have consulted archives and personal papers in Russia, the United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and Sweden. They are listed in detail in the bibliography. All newspapers, magazines, and journals consulted are cited in the endnotes.
Notes
Prologue
The Italian was in Peredelkino to charm a poet: The description of May 20, 1956, and D’Angelo’s meeting with Pasternak, including direct quotes, comes from D’Angelo’s memoir Delo Pasternaka (The Pasternak Affair); interviews with D’Angelo in Moscow in September 2007 and in Viterbo, Italy, in May 2012; and numerous email exchanges between the authors and D’Angelo. D’Angelo also provided the authors with an unpublished English-language version of Delo Pasternaka. D’Angelo’s book can be read in English at his website: http://www.pasternakbydangelo.com. D’Angelo acknowledges that in his memoirs he got the date wrong of the Radio Moscow broadcast about Doctor Zhivago, placing it in May, not April. He insists that the May 20 date is correct.
the women wore kerchiefs: “Boris Pasternak: The Art of Fiction No. 25,” interview by Olga Carlisle, The Paris Review 24 (1960): 61–66.
village lore: Lobov and Vasilyeva, “Peredelkino: Skazanie o pisatel’skom gorodke.”
“Entrapping writers within a cocoon of comforts”: Carlisle, Under a New Sky, 13.
“The production of souls”: K. Zelinsky, “Odna vstrecha u M. Gor’kogo. Zapis’ iz dnevnika” (A meeting at M. Gorky’s. Entry from the diary), Voprosy literatury 5 (1991), 166; Ruder, Making History for Stalin, 44.
an Arab and his horse: Tsvetaeva, Art in the Light of Conscience, 22.
“half closing his slanted brown eyes”: “Boris Pasternak: The Art of Fiction No. 25,” interview by Olga Carlisle, The Paris Review 24 (1960): 61–66.
“like speaking to the victims of shipwreck”: Berlin, Personal Impressions, 230.
“like a melting glacier it grew up”: Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct, 71.
“He always spoke with his peculiar brand of vitality”: Berlin, Personal Impressions, 220.
“Publication abroad would expose me”: Boris Pasternak, Family Correspondence, 376.
the side gate between their gardens: Shentalinsky, The KGB’s Literary Archive, 145.
“To me a finished literary work is like weapon”: Ibid., 141.
Pasternak remembered Pilnyak: Berlin, Personal Impressions, 225.
“Is it really you?”: Shentalinsky, The KGB’s Literary Archive, 139.
“to have paper”: Ibid., 156.
All of Pilnyak’s works: Ibid., 157.
24,138,799 copies of “politically damaging” works: Westerman, Engineers of the Soul, 188.
“It was awful”: Zinaida Pasternak, Vospominaniya, in Boris Pasternak, Vtoroe Rozhdenie, 293.
“somnambulistic quality”: Chukovsky, Diary, December 10, 1931, 262.
“My final happiness and madness”: Boris Pasternak, letter to Olga Freidenberg, January 24, 1947, in Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, Correspondence, 263.
“zoological apostasy”: Novy Mir (New World) board to Pasternak, September 1956 letter published in Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Gazette) October 25, 1958. See Conquest, Courage of Genius, Appendix II, 136–63.
The manuscript “should be given to anyone who asks for it”: Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time, 195.
“Don’t yell at me”: Conquest, Courage of Genius, 37–38.
“a vast white expanse” “Boris Pasternak: The Art of Fiction No. 25,” interview by Olga Carlisle, The Paris Review 24 (1960): 61–66.
The manuscript was 433 closely typed pages: The original manuscript obtained by D’Angelo is held at La Biblioteca della Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Milan.
“You are hereby invited to my execution”: D’Angelo, Delo Pasternaka, 13.
nearly 1,500 writers in the Soviet Union were executed or died in labor camps: Shentalinsky, The KGB’s Literary Archive, 6.
“Art belongs to the people”: Garrard and Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union, 27.
“irretrievably second-rate”: Caute, Politics and the Novel During the Cold War, 150.
In the Obozerka forced-labor camp: Gladkov, Meetings with Pasternak, 172.
“the skies were deeper”: Victor Frank, “The Meddlesome Poet: Boris Pasternak’s Rise to Greatness,” The Dublin Review (Spring 1958): 52.
“fidelity to poetic truth”: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dnevnik Pisatelya (A Writer’s Diary), quoted in Wachtel, An Obsession with History, 13.
“deadening and merciless”: Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (2010), 360.
It was said that British intelligence: Felix Morrow letter to Carl R. Proffer, October 20, 1980, in University of Michigan Special Collections Library: Box 7 of the Ardis Collection Records, Folder heading Ardis Author/Name Files—Morrow, Felix.
Some of Pasternak’s French friends believed: Boris Pasternak, Lettres à mes amies françaises (1956–1960), 41.
a theory that has periodically resurfaced: Dutch intelligence officials believed the target of the printing for the CIA was the Nobel Prize. C. C. van den Heuvel, interview by Petra Couvée, February 22, 1999. See also Chris Vos, De Geheime Dienst: verhalen over de BVD (The Secret Service: Stories about the BVD). The Russian author Ivan Tolstoy most recently gave currency to this thesis in Otmytyi roman Pasternaka, “Doctor Zhivago” mezhdu KGB i TsRU (Pasternak’s Laundered Novel: Between the KGB and the CIA). For the Malta story see “A Footnote to the Zhivago Affair, or Ann Arbor’s Strange Connections with Russian Literature,” in Carl R. Proffer, The Widows of Russia.
the printing was the work of Russian émigrés: The Stanford University scholar Lazar Fleishman made this argument in Vstrecha russkoi emigratsii s “Doktorom Zhivago”: Boris Pasternak i “kholodnaya voina.”
Chapter 1
Bullets cracked: Alexander Pasternak, A Vanished Present, 204.
“the scream of wheeling swifts”: Ibid., 205.
“the air drained clear”: Ibid., 206.
kibitka: Boris Pasternak, “Lyudi i polozheniya” (People and Circumstances), in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 3, 328.
“Just imagine when an ocean of blood”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 1, 224; Konstantin Loks, “Povest’ ob odnom desyatiletii 1907–1917” (Tale of a Decade 1907–1917) in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 56.
“overwhelmed” and “intoxicated”: Josephine Pasternak, Tightrope Walking, 82.
“I watched a meeting last night”: This quote up to “the roof over the whole of Russia has
been torn off” from Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (2010), 128.
“What magnificent surgery”: Ibid., 173.
“the abolition of all exploitation”: Smith, The Russian Revolution, 40.
“First, the ideas of general improvement”: Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (2010), 303.
“I grant you’re all bright lights”: Ibid., 304.
“a man of a dreamy, gentle disposition”: Mark, The Family Pasternak, 110.
“one of those he had described”: Boris Pasternak, I Remember, 67.
“I have observed art and important people”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak,vol. 1, 20; Boris Pasternak letter to M. A. Froman, June 17, 1927, in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 8, 42.
“Mother was music”: Mark, The Family Pasternak, 111.
“craving for improvisation”: Boris Pasternak, I Remember, 38.
his natural talents: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 1, 82; Alexander Pasternak, Vanished Present, 135.
“I despised everything uncreative”: Boris Pasternak, I Remember, 40.
a “tipsy society”: Boris Pasternak, Safe Conduct, 23.
“They did not suspect”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 1, 94; Konstantin Loks, “Povest’ ob odnom desyatiletii 1907–1917” (Tale of a Decade 1907-1917), in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 11, 37.
“spoke in a toneless voice”: Tsvetaeva, Art in the Light of Conscience, 22.
“not of this world”: Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, Correspondence, 3.
“Borya did all the talking as usual”: Ibid., 10.
“Just try to live normally”: Barnes, Boris Pasternak, vol. 1, 140; Boris Pasternak letter to A. Stikh, July 4/17 and June 29/July 11, 1912, in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 7, 125.
“God, how successful my trip”: Boris Pasternak letter to A. Stikh, June 29/July 11, 1912, in Boris Pasternak, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, vol. 7, 122.
