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

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 Mancosu, 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.