Writing from Russia, Without Love

Of all the things you might expect the Central Intelligence Agency to tweet, Cyrillic would not be one of them. Yet, there it was, one January morning—a quote from Russian author Boris Pasternak, that when translated in English, says, “I wrote the novel so that it would be published and read, and that remains my only desire.”

Unlike the Twitter account of the United States Central Command, which was seized around the same time by hackers proclaiming allegiance to the Islamic State, this was no hack. Later tweets explained the cryptic message: “Our book program arranged to publish the 1st Russian-language edition of Pasternak’s Doctor #Zhivago – a book banned in the USSR.”

It had been long suspected that the CIA had played a role in smuggling Pasternak’s famous novel, rejected by the censors for its unrosy depiction of Soviet life. But the agency remained quiet until a Freedom of Information Act request revealed a trove of documents in April 2013, detailing its intimate, often bumbling, involvement in arranging the book’s publication and smuggling in the USSR.

Why go to all this trouble for a simple book? After all, it’s hard to imagine a single book propelling the American populace one way or the other, but then again, a Russian’s relationship with their literature was and remains much deeper than ours. Rare is the Russian who has not read Tolstoy’s weighty masterpieces, and common are nine year olds who would cite Dostoyevsky as their favorite author.

Books are “the most important and most powerful weapons in socialist culture,” in the words of Maxim Gorky.

“Only in Russia poetry is respected—it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?” the poet Osip Mandelstam said. In one of irony’s sick twists, he himself would die in a Siberian camp after writing an anti-Stalin poem.

It is said that Pasternak, who was most known for his poetry and not his novels within the USSR, was taken off an execution list by Stalin himself, who remarked: “Leave him. He’s a cloud dweller.”

Writers were one of the few holdouts of resistance to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which desperately wanted to inculcate partiinost, or “party mindedness,” and engender a new literature that extolled socialist virtues and glorified Soviet life.

The politburo wanted literature to be returned to its “traditional position as the handmaiden of politics,” as a CIA Soviet Staff study put it. “In the Soviet context…the artist is viewed as a ‘transmission belt,’ an ‘engineer of the human soul,’ whose function is to popularize official directives.”

Addressing the 1959 Writers’ Congress, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev put it this way: “Listen, dear friends. If there is anyone who discloses and lays bare deficiencies and vices…it is the party and the central committee.

To be a writer in the USSR, one had to be a member of the Soviet Union of Writers, which sought to supervise literature in that most soul-deadening and creativity-crushing  mechanism known to man: committees.

Naturally, this all made for very shitty literature. The people knew it, and the party knew it too.

“I’ve heard that Shakespeare didn’t belong to any union, and he didn’t write badly,” Vladimir Pomerantsev wrote in his influential 1953 essay decrying the artificiality of Soviet literature that inaugurated what is known as “The Thaw,” a brief respite from stiff censorship and control.

But there was a limit. When Pasternak handed over his manuscript to the Italian journalist Sergio d’Angelo for publication in Italy, he declared, “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad.”

Where some saw literary promise, the CIA saw valuable propaganda: publication of the novel would be a “possible blow to those who have insisted that Soviets enjoy internal freedom for expression and enjoyment of arts,” a cable to the agency’s director claimed.

The suppression, the cable went on to say, could galvanize public intellectuals like “Picasso[,] Roberson[,] Chaplin[,] Beauvoir[,] et al.” to denounce the USSR. And if they didn’t, “their refusals might…repudiate their fast and future pronouncements.” Win-win.

So, a Dutch publication house was found, the first run of 1,000 novels was rushed for distribution at the 1958 Brussels world’s fair, and a later 9,000 miniature Russian copies were designed and published. “The book was designed so that it could be easily concealed and fits inside a man’s suit or trouser pocket,” a 1959 CIA cable wrote.

The book was an international bestseller. Khrushchev and the communist party were furious—ever more so when Pasternak was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, which he was forced to decline.

Fellow writers were pressured to repudiate him. Vladimir Semichastny, the future KGB leader who was then head of the Komsomol, the youth division of the communist party, declared Pasternak unworthy of comparison with even a pig, for “a pig never defiles the place where it eats, never defiles the place where it sleeps” in a speech that was said to have been written by Khrushchev himself.

Pasternak was mortified, and would succumb to lung cancer months later in 1960. His family later accepted the Nobel Prize on his behalf in 1989.

And that’s the story behind those 100 Cyrillic characters.

Idrees M. Kahloon ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is an applied mathematics concentrator in Dunster House.