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The Zhivago Affair

the Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book
Sep 01, 2015wyenotgo rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
The title may be a bit misleading: Cold War clashes between the Kremlin and the CIA form a very small part of this book. In reality, it's a biography of Boris Pasternak and a journalistic account of the artistic repression imposed by the Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet regimes in the 1950s and that continued through the 1970s. While the vehemence with which the regime persecuted Pasternak for what they perceived as an anti-Soviet novel clearly revealed to the western world the state of fear that drove the Kremlin to act as it did, and though they were never really successful in suppressing the work, none of that relieved Pasternak and his family and small circle of closest friends from the effects of the Kremlin's vicious, unrelenting attacks. Perhaps the most outrageous of all was the dreadful punishment that continued to be visited upon Pasternak's lover Olga Ivinskaya and her young daughter Irina after Pasternak's death, ostensibly for illegal currency trading (i.e. having helped Pasternak to smuggle in some money from abroad to support his family while he was prevented from earning a living) but really out of spite and in an attempt to further discredit anyone who had supported Pasternak in any way. The final irony is surely that Khruschchev, having read "Doctor Zhivago" after his ouster a few years later concluded that "We shouldn't have banned it. There's nothing anti-Soviet in it."