How the CIA Came to Publish Doctor Zhivago

Sixty-Seven-Year-old Russian writer, Boris Pasternak was a very famous and respected writer and translators of other books into Russian. His book of poetry, In My Sister's Life, is a classic.  However, like most writers he wanted to write the great novel, so he did and that novel was Doctor Zhivago.  He could not wait for the people to read his masterpiece about the doomed love affair between the married- to-other-people Dr. Yuri Zhivago and nurse Lara Guichard Antipov set against first World War I and then the Bolshevik Revolution.

When the Soviet hierarchy read a copy of it before it hits the press, they see the book as an attack on the Communist regime such as his subtle criticism against Stalin, Collectivization, The Great Purge, and the Gulag and ban the book.  Despondent that his book will not be published in his country, yet eager to see it published somewhere he arranges for the manuscript to be smuggled out by Sergio D'Angelo to an Italian printer who has it translated into eighteen different languages.  The book is an international sensation and hit.  Critics hail the work as that of a genius.  However, this does not make Pasternak happy as his own people, for whom he wrote the novel, cannot read it.

In 1958 the CIA are looking for a way to undermine the Soviets when they receive the book from their friends at MI6. They too interpret the book as being against communism and soon hatch a propaganda plot to publish it and get it smuggled into the Soviet Union.  In September at the World's Fair in Brussels, they pass the book to those Soviet diplomats that are sympathizers to the CIA'a cause.  Like the rest of the world, they too love the book and tear off the cover and smuggle it into the Soviet Union where they pass it along to others. Soon, the people are finding ways to buy their own black market copy of the book that has been smuggled in or reading a copy from a friend and it is all the Soviet Union can talk about.  It did not, however, as the CIA hoped, end communism in the Soviet Union.

One month later Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature for Doctor Zhivago and book sales really soar.  If he accepted this award his mistress Olga would be sent to a gulag and it was hinted that if he traveled to Stockholm to attend the ceremony he would not be allowed to reenter the Soviet Union. So Pasternak politely refused the great honor.  Despite his refusal of the Nobel Prize, the Soviet Union of Writers hounded him daily in the press demanding that he be kicked out of the country. Pasternak wrote an impassioned letter to Khrushchev begging to be allowed to stay, because "leaving the motherland will equal death to me. I am tied to Russia by birth, by life and work." Indian Prime Minister Nehru interceded on his behalf and he was allowed to stay in the Soviet Union. Pasternak died on May 30, 1960, of lung cancer.