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

Boris Pasternak in 1940. He had survived Stalin’s purges and had become disillusioned with the Soviet state. (illustration credit ill.1)

Boris Pasternak (left) and Kornei Chukovsky (center), the critic and children’s book writer, at the Tenth Komsomol Conference in 1936. The two were lifelong neighbors in Peredelkino, the writer’s colony outside Moscow. (illustration credit ill.2)

The poet Anna Akhmatova with Pasternak in 1946, shortly after Pasternak began writing Doctor Zhivago. The two writers were the outstanding, surviving poets of their generation, and devoted friends, but Akhmatova was ambivalent about Pasternak’s novel. (illustration credit ill.3)

Olga Ivinskaya, who met Pasternak in 1946, became his lover and literary agent and was the inspiration, in part, for the character Lara in Doctor Zhivago. (illustration credit ill.4)

Olga Ivinskaya, from a medallion made several years before she met Pasternak (illustration credit ill.5)

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli first published Doctor Zhivago in translation in 1957 and defied both the Italian Communist Party and the Kremlin, which wanted to suppress the novel. (illustration credit ill.6)

Alexei Surkov, the poet and Soviet literary bureaucrat who attempted to block publication of Doctor Zhivago in the West and nursed a deep enmity toward Pasternak (illustration credit ill.7)

The New York publisher Felix Morrow, who was hired by the CIA to secretly produce a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago. Morrow and the agency clashed during the operation. (illustration credit ill.8)

The blue-linen case for the CIA’s hardcover edition of Doctor Zhivago, which was printed in The Hague by the Dutch publishing house Mouton & Co. A package of 365 copies was sent to Belgium and distributed at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. (illustration credit ill.9)

The title page of the CIA’s hardcover edition of Doctor Zhivago raised suspicions. It acknowledged the copy-right of “G. Feltrinelli–Milan,” but the name of the publisher was not correctly transcribed into Russian. The use of the writer’s full name, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, also suggested a foreign origin: Russians would not use the patronymic on a title page. (illustration credit ill.10)

The title page of a 1959 miniature paperback edition of Doctor Zhivago. About 10,000 copies were printed at CIA headquarters. A copy is held at the in-house CIA museum in Langley, Virginia. (illustration credit ill.11)

Copies of Doctor Zhivago were handed to Soviet visitors from a small hidden library inside the Vatican Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. (illustration credit ill.12)

Anders Österling was the secretary of the Swedish Academy when it chose Boris Pasternak for the 1958 the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pasternak was forced to turn the prize down after officials in Moscow attacked the Academy’s decision as an anti-Soviet provocation. (illustration credit ill.13)

Pasternak near his home in the countryside outside Moscow, shortly after he learned that he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature (illustration credit ill.14)

A view of the dacha in the village of Peredelkino, outside Moscow, where Boris Pasternak lived and wrote for several decades. The photo was taken the day after Pasternak’s death on May 30, 1960. (illustration credit ill.15)

Boris Pasternak reads telegrams of congratulations after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. At right is his wife, Zinaida, and at left is his friend Nina Tabidze, the widow of the Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze, who was killed in the purges. (illustration credit ill.16)

Olga Ivinskaya and her daughter, Irina, with Pasternak. They formed a second family for the poet. (illustration credit ill.17)

The 1958 Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoon by Bill Mauldin. The original caption: “I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?” (illustration credit ill.18)

The front page of The Washington Post featured senior Soviet official Anastas Mikoyan staring at a bookstore window full of copies of Doctor Zhivago during a visit to Washington, D.C., in January 1959. (illustration credit ill.19

The casket of Boris Pasternak is carried out of his dacha in Peredelkino. (illustration credit ill.20)

Pasternak’s wife, Zinaida (foreground, extreme right), looks down on the body of her husband, while Pasternak’s lover, Olga Ivinskaya (extreme left), cries. Behind Zinaida, holding her at the waist, is her and Pasternak’s son, Leonid. (illustration credit ill.21)

Boris Pasternak looks out from the upstairs study of his dacha in Peredelkino, 1958. (illustration credit ill.22)