The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and a Forbidden Book Read online

  It has also been argued that the printing was the work of Russian émigrés in Europe and the agency’s involvement was marginal—no more than that of the financier of émigré front organizations. The CIA was in fact deeply involved. The operation to print and distribute Doctor Zhivago was run by the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division, monitored by CIA director Allen Dulles, and sanctioned by President Eisenhower’s Operations Coordinating Board, which reported to the National Security Council at the White House. The agency arranged the printing of a hardcover edition in 1958 in the Netherlands and printed a miniature paperback edition of the novel at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., in 1959.

  A weapon in the ideological battles between East and West—this, too, is part of Doctor Zhivago’s extraordinary life.

  Chapter 1

  “The roof over the whole of Russia has been torn off.”

  Bullets cracked against the facade of the Pasternak family’s apartment building on Volkhonka Street in central Moscow, pierced the windows, and whistled into the plaster ceilings. The gunfire, which began with a few isolated skirmishes, escalated into all-out street fighting in the surrounding neighborhood, and drove the family into the back rooms of the spacious second-floor flat. That, too, seemed perilous when shrapnel from an artillery barrage struck the back of the building. Those few civilians who ventured out on Volkhonka crab-ran from hiding spot to hiding spot. One of the Pasternaks’ neighbors was shot and killed when he crossed in front of one of his windows.

  On October 25, 1917, in a largely bloodless coup, the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, the Russian capital, which had been called Saint Petersburg until World War I broke out and a Germanic name became intolerable. Other major centers did not fall so easily as militants loyal to the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin battled the Provisional Government that had been in power since March. There was more than a week of fighting in Moscow, the country’s commercial center and second city, and the Pasternaks found themselves in the middle of it. The family’s apartment building was on a street that crested a hill. The flat’s nine street-side windows offered a panoramic view of the Moscow River and the monumental golden dome of Christ the Savior Cathedral. The Kremlin was just a few hundred meters to the northeast along the bend of the river. Pasternak, who rented a room in the Arbat neighborhood, had happened over to his parents’ place on the day the fighting began and found himself stuck there, eventually huddling with his parents and younger, twenty-four-year-old brother, Alexander, in the downstairs apartment of a neighbor. The telephone and lights were out, and water only occasionally, and then briefly, trickled out of the taps. Boris’s two sisters—Josephine and Lydia—were caught in similarly miserable conditions at the nearby home of their cousin. They had gone out for a stroll on an unseasonably mild evening when, suddenly, armored cars began to careen through streets that quickly emptied. The sisters had just made it to the shelter of their cousin’s home when a man across the street was felled by a shot. For days, the constant crackle of machine-gun fire and the thud of exploding shells were punctuated by “the scream of wheeling swifts and swallows.” And then as quickly as it started “the air drained clear, and a terrifying silence fell.” Moscow had fallen to the Soviets.

  Russia’s year of revolution had begun the previous February when women protesting bread shortages in Petrograd were joined by tens of thousands of striking workers and the national war weariness swelled into a sea of demonstrators against the exhausted autocracy. Two million Russians would die in the carnage at the Eastern Front and another 1.5 million civilians died from disease and military action. The economy of the vast, backward Russian empire was collapsing. When troops loyal to the czar fired on the crowds, killing hundreds, the capital was in open revolt. On March 3, having been abandoned by the army, Nicholas II abdicated, and the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty was at an end.

  Pasternak, who had been assigned to a chemical factory in the Urals to support the war effort, hurried back to Moscow. He traveled part of the journey on a kibitka, a covered wagon on runners, and warded off the cold with sheepskin coats and hay. Pasternak and his siblings welcomed the fall of the monarchy, the emergence a new Provisional Government, and, above all, the prospect of a constitutional political order. Subjects became citizens, and they reveled in the transformation. “Just imagine when an ocean of blood and filth begins to give out light,” Pasternak told one friend. His sister Josephine described him as “overwhelmed” and “intoxicated” by the charisma of Alexander Kerensky, a leading political figure, and his effect on a crowd outside the Bolshoi Theatre that spring. The Provisional Government abolished censorship and introduced freedom of assembly.

  Pasternak would later channel the sense of euphoria into his novel. The hero of Doctor Zhivago was spellbound by the public discourse, which was brilliantly alive, almost magical. “I watched a meeting last night. An astounding spectacle,” said Yuri Zhivago, in a passage where the character describes the first months after the fall of the czar. “Mother Russia has begun to move, she won’t stay put, she walks and never tires of walking, she talks and can’t talk enough. And it’s not as if only people are talking. Stars and trees come together and converse, night flowers philosophize, and stone buildings hold meetings. Something gospel-like, isn’t it? As in the time of the apostles. Remember, in Paul? ‘Speak in tongues and prophesy. Pray for the gift of interpretation.’ ”

  It seemed to Zhivago that “the roof over the whole of Russia has been torn off.” The political ferment also enfeebled the Provisional Government, which was unable to establish its writ. It was overwhelmed above all by the widely hated decision to keep fighting in the world war. The Bolsheviks, earning popular support with the promise of “Bread, Peace and Land,” and driven by Lenin’s calculation that power was for the taking, launched their insurrection and a second revolution in October. “What magnificent surgery,” Pasternak wrote in Doctor Zhivago. “To take and at one stroke artistically cut out the old, stinking sores!”

  The Bolsheviks, in their constitution, promised Utopia—“the abolition of all exploitation of man by man, the complete elimination of the division of society into classes, the ruthless suppression of the exploiters, the establishment of a socialist organization of society, and the victory of socialism in all countries.”

  Yuri Zhivago quickly is disillusioned by the convulsions of the new order: “First, the ideas of general improvement, as they’ve been understood since October, don’t set me on fire. Second, it’s all still so far from realization, while the mere talk about it has been paid for with such seas of blood that I don’t think the ends justify the means. Third, and this is the main thing, when I hear about the remaking of life, I lose control of myself and fall into despair.”

  The word remaking was the same one Stalin used when toasting his writers and demanding engineers of the soul. Zhivago tells his interlocutor, a guerrilla commander: “I grant you’re all bright lights and liberators of Russia, that without you she would perish, drowned in poverty and ignorance, and nevertheless I can’t be bothered with you, and I spit on you, I don’t like you, and you can all go to the devil.”

  These are the judgments of a much older Pasternak, writing more than three decades after the revolution and looking back in sorrow and disgust. At the time, when Pasternak was twenty-seven, he was a man in love, writing poetry, and swept along in the “greatness of the moment.”

  The Pasternaks were a prominent family within Moscow’s artistic intelligentsia, who looked to the West, and were disposed to support the political reform of an autocratic, sclerotic system. Boris’s father, Leonid, was a well-known impressionist painter and a professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. He was born to a Jewish innkeeper in the Black Sea city of Odessa, a multi-ethnic and dynamic center within the Pale of Settlement where most of Russia’s Jews were forced to reside. Odessa had a rich cultural life and Alexander Pushkin, who lived there in the early part of the nineteenth century, wrote “the ai
r is filled with all Europe.” Leonid first moved to Moscow in 1881, to study medicine at Moscow University. By the fall of 1882, queasy about working with cadavers, he abandoned medicine and enrolled at the Bavarian Royal Academy of Art in Munich. His daughter Lydia described him as “a man of a dreamy, gentle disposition … slow and uncertain in anything but his work.”

  After obligatory military service, Leonid returned to Moscow in 1888, and his first sale—a painting entitled Letter from Home—was to Pavel Tretyakov, a collector whose purchases denoted a kind of arrival for favored artists. Leonid also established a reputation as a skilled illustrator, and he contributed to an edition of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace in 1892. The following year, Leonid and Tolstoy met and became friends. Over the years, Leonid sketched the Russian writer numerous times, including in death at the Astapovo train station in 1910. Leonid brought Boris on the overnight train to pay respects to Tolstoy, and Boris recalled that the grand old man seemed tiny and wizened, no longer a mountain, just “one of those he had described and scattered over his pages by the dozen.”

  Tolstoy visited the Pasternak apartment in Moscow, as did the composers Sergei Rachmaninov and Alexander Scriabin, among other cultural figures of the day, many of whom were painted by Leonid. The children viewed the visiting dignitaries as a fact of home life. “I have observed art and important people from my earliest days, and I have become accustomed to treating the sublime and exclusive as something natural, as a norm of life,” wrote Pasternak, recalling the luminaries who graced his parents’ parlor and his father’s studio.

  Pasternak’s childhood was also filled with music. His mother, née Rozalia Kaufman, was an extraordinarily precocious child who, as a five-year-old coming to the piano for the first time, perfectly reproduced pieces played by her cousin simply from having watched him. Roza, as she was called, was the daughter of a wealthy soda-water manufacturer in Odessa. She gave her first recital at age eight, by eleven was drawing glowing reviews in the local press, and two years later toured southern Russia. She performed in Saint Petersburg, studied in Vienna, and was appointed a professor of music at the Odessa conservatory before she was twenty. “Mother was music,” her daughter Lydia wrote. “There may be a greater virtuoso, a more brilliant performer but no-one with greater penetration, something indefinable, which makes you burst out in tears at the first chord, at each movement in sheer joy and ecstasy.” Roza’s potential as a major pianist of her age was curtailed, however, by anxiety, heart problems, and marriage. She met Leonid Pasternak in 1886 in Odessa, and they were married in February 1889 in Moscow. Boris was born the following year. His brother, Alexander, was born in 1893, Josephine in 1900, and Lydia in 1902.

  By twelve, Boris was imagining a career as a pianist and composer. The “craving for improvisation and composition flared up in me and grew into a passion.” He quit when he realized that his skills at the piano lacked the brilliance and natural flair of some of the composers he idolized, such as Scriabin. Pasternak could not tolerate the possibility that he would not achieve greatness. As a boy, he was used to being the best and the first, and he had an inner arrogance about his own skills. He had equal measures of physical and intellectual confidence. After watching local peasant girls ride horses one summer in the countryside, Boris convinced himself that he, too, could ride bareback. It became an obsession to test himself. When he finally persuaded a girl to let him ride her mount, the twelve-year-old boy was thrown by a panicking filly while jumping a stream, and broke his right thighbone. When it healed, his right leg was slightly shorter, and the resulting lameness, although disguised for much of his life, kept him out of military service in the First World War. Pasternak’s brother said that his natural talents “confirmed in him a strong faith in his own powers, in his abilities and in his destiny.” Second-best was something to be cast aside in a fit of pique, and forgotten. “I despised everything uncreative, any kind of hack work, being conceited enough to imagine I was a judge in these matters,” Pasternak wrote many years later. “In real life, I thought, everything must be a miracle, everything must be predestined from above, nothing must be deliberately designed or planned, nothing must be done to follow one’s own fancies.” The piano abandoned, he turned toward poetry.

  While he was a student at Moscow University, where he studied law and then philosophy and graduated with a first-class honors degree, Pasternak attended a salon of young authors, musicians, and poets—a “tipsy society” that mixed artistic experimentation and discovery with rum-laced tea. Moscow was full of overlapping and feuding salons built around competing philosophies of art, and Pasternak was an ardent if little-known participant. “They did not suspect that there before them was a great poet, and meanwhile treated him as an intriguing curiosity without ascribing any serious importance to him,” said his friend Konstantin Loks. One observer at a reading said he “spoke in a toneless voice and forgot nearly all the lines.… There was an impression of painful concentration, one wanted to give him a push, like a carriage that won’t go—‘Get a move on!’—and as not a single word came across (just mutterings like some bear waking up), one kept thinking impatiently: ‘Lord, why does he torment himself and us like this.’ ” His cousin Olga Freidenberg thought Pasternak was “not of this world,” that he was absent-minded and self-absorbed: “Borya did all the talking as usual,” Olga exclaimed to her diary after a long walk.

  Pasternak was prone to unrequited infatuations, a spur for his poetry but dispiriting for the young man. While at the University of Marburg, where he studied philosophy in the summer of 1912, he was rebuffed by a woman, Ida Vysotskaya, the daughter of a rich Moscow tea merchant, to whom he professed his love. “Just try to live normally,” Ida told him. “You’ve been led astray by your way of life. Anyone who hasn’t lunched and is short of sleep discovers lots of wild and incredible ideas in himself.” Ida’s rejection led to a burst of poetry writing on the day he was supposed to be turning in a paper for his philosophy class. He ultimately decided against staying at the German university to pursue a doctorate in philosophy. “God, how successful my trip to Marburg is. But I am giving up everything—art it is, and nothing else.” Pasternak tended to talk at his wished-for lovers, interspersing rhapsodies of affection with philosophical treatises. Another woman, who balked at something more intimate than friendship, complained their “meetings were rather monologues on his part.” These amorous failings left Pasternak emotionally shattered, and they prompted some intense periods of writing.

  His first stand-alone publication appeared in December 1913 after a productive summer where he “wrote poetry not as a rare exception but often and continuously, as one paints or composes music.” The resulting collection, called Twin in the Storm Clouds, drew little attention or enthusiasm and an older Pasternak later dismissed these efforts as painfully pretentious. A second volume, Over the Barriers, appeared in early 1917. Some of the poems were cut—grievously—by the czarist censor, the book was littered with misprints, and it, too, received little attention from the critics. Still, for Over the Barriers, Pasternak got paid for the first time—150 rubles, a memorable moment for any writer. The Russian writer Andrei Sinyavsky described Pasternak’s first two volumes as “a tuning-up,” and said it was “part of the search for a voice of his own, for his own view of life, for his own place amid the diversity of literary currents.”

  In the summer of 1917 Pasternak was in love with Yelena Vinograd, a young war widow, student, and enthusiastic supporter of the revolution. She took the poet to demonstrations and political meetings, enjoyed his company, but was not sexually attracted to him. “The relationship remained platonic, unphysical and unconsummated emotionally, and it was thus an intensely tormenting one for Pasternak,” wrote one scholar. The fuel of passion and frustration, all playing out against the backdrop of a society that was being utterly transformed, led to a cycle of poems that would vault Pasternak into the front ranks of Russian literature. The collection was called My Sister Life and came with the subti
tle Summer 1917. At first, only handwritten copies of the poems circulated and the work gained a popularity “no poet since Pushkin achieved on the basis of manuscript copies.”

  Because of the upheaval of revolution, and the subsequent privation of the civil war, when much literary publishing ground to a halt because of a lack of paper, the book did not appear until 1922—long after Vinograd had departed and Pasternak had finally found love with Yevgenia Lurye, an artist.

  They first met at a birthday party where Yevgenia, striking in a green dress, drew the attention of a number of young men. Pasternak recited his poetry, but the young woman was distracted and didn’t pay attention. “Right you are, why listen to such nonsense?” said Pasternak.

  She wanted to see him again and was responsive to his expressions of ardor. “Ah, it were better I never lose this feeling,” he wrote her, describing how much he missed her when she visited her parents before their marriage. “It is like a conversation with you, murmuring profoundly, dripping mutely, secretly—and true.… What am I to do, what am I to call this magnetism and saturation with the melody of you other than the distraction you compel, and which I would dispel—like one lost in the woods.”

  They married in 1922. Pasternak had the gold medal he won as his high school’s best student melted in order to make wedding rings, which he engraved roughly himself: “Zhenya and Borya.” Their son Yevgeni—named after his mother—was born in 1923. They lived in a small section of the Pasternak family’s old apartment now divided among six families. “Hemmed in on all sides by noise, can only concentrate for periods at a time by dint of extreme sublimated desperation, akin to self-oblivion,” he complained to the All-Russian Union of Writers. Often he could only work at night when silence fell over the house, staying awake with cigarettes and hot tea.