The Book That Came In From the Cold
Review of the Vintage paperback edition (April 2015) of the original Pantheon hardcover edition (June 2014)

I enjoyed the fictionalized version of The Zhivago Affair in Lara Prescott's The Secrets We Kept (Sept. 2019) earlier this year and wanted to read more of the real-life story. Prescott superimposed her original fictional story of intrigues within the CIA on the actual story of Boris Pasternak and the publication of [book:Doctor Zhivago|130440]. Prescott's achievement is somewhat diminished in hindsight as a considerable amount of her book is simply retelling the story from this 2014 investigative work.

Although The Zhivago Affair trumpets about the release of declassified CIA files, it does seem like the co-authors learned more of the story from retired players who spoke under conditions of anonymity and from the more forthcoming Netherlands' Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst (BVD) (National Intelligence and Security Agency) who also participated in the Zhivago publication campaign.

I still found the whole story to be fascinating and the amount of research done by coauthors Peter Finn and Petra Couvée was quite extraordinary. ( )

Brilliant and tragic. ( )

The Zhivago Affair: The Krem­lin, the CIA, and the Bat­tle over a For­bid­den Book by Peter Finn and Petra Cou­vee is a non-fiction book cov­er­ing the his­tory of the famous novel Dr. Zhivago by Boris Paster­nak and how it was used by the CIA for pro­pa­ganda purposes.

The Zhivago Affair: The Krem­lin, the CIA, and the Bat­tle over a For­bid­den Book by Peter Finn and Petra Cou­vee is an excit­ing, well researched and well writ­ten book. The authors go to great length not only to tell a story, but give the reader the his­tor­i­cal con­text in which the events were hap­pen­ing, as well as the social and polit­i­cal climates.

The Soviet Union’s lit­er­a­ture in the 1950s had to go through so many lay­ers of bureau­cratic cen­sor­ship that what was finally pub­lished was sim­ply pro­pa­ganda. If a writer, poet or artist went against the sys­tem, they suf­fered finan­cially, pub­licly, phys­i­cally and some­times all three as well as for­feited their lives. Famous author Boris Paster­nak was spared some of these pun­ish­ments because Stalin, it is said, liked his poetry.

Mr. Pasternak’s mas­ter­piece, Dr. Zhivago, was not allowed to be pub­lished in the Soviet Union, it was seen as too crit­i­cal of the 1917 rev­o­lu­tion as well as the chaos and dis­or­der that fol­lowed. In an act of coura­geous civil dis­obe­di­ence, know­ing full well the con­se­quences of his actions, the author allowed the work he has writ­ten over decades to be smug­gled to Italy and published.

The CIA, try­ing to encour­age dis­si­dents and get under the skin of the Soviet gov­ern­ment, printed hun­dreds of copies of Dr. Zhivago in Russ­ian to be passed out at the 1958 World's Fair in Brus­sels, when Russ­ian tourists enter the Vat­i­can Pavil­ion. In 1958, Boris Paster­nak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Lit­er­a­ture, he paid dearly for the prize, being denounced and expelled from the Union of Soviet Writ­ers (which means he could not get pub­lished in his home­land). Sadly, Mr. Paster­nak was forced to reject the Noble Prize.

This is a won­der­ful book, the title is a bit mis­lead­ing since the CIA oper­a­tion is not a big part of the story. A book about a bril­liant, and brave writer, a sys­tem that tried to destroy him and a sys­tem that tried to use him to win a very small vic­tory in the Cold War.

For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com ( )

"Books are different from all other propaganda media," wrote the CIA chief of covert action, "primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader's attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium...that is, of course, not true of all books at all times and with all readers -- but it is true significantly often enough to make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda."

This is the true story of how the CIA used the novel Dr. Zhivago as a weapon in the cold-war fight for the hearts and minds of Russian citizens. In fact, the CIA had a "book program" which smuggled hundreds of titles into eastern bloc countries. So, beyond all the politics, beyond the biography of Boris Pasternak, this book is also a testament to the power of literature.

The book is well written, almost reading like a spy novel at times. We see what life was like in Stalinist Russia and how important the Cold War was to the U.S. We see the life of Boris Pasternak, including the open affair he carried on and the pressure placed on him to renounce the Nobel Prize for Literature. ( )