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

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 who 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.