CIA's war of words with the Soviets

The Zhivago Affair
by Peter Finn and Petra Couvee 
Harvill Secker 
4 stars

Those were the days, that glorious time when high culture used to matter, and the CIA and the KGB fought cold wars about it. But in the era of the World Wide Web, who can take seriously the idea of smuggling books through the iron curtain? It just seems so far away.

For the CIA, it was "something of a caper" to try to flood the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites with forbidden books and periodicals, to show them freedom in action, and introduce them to the idea of cultural diversity. But there was American idealism in there too. It is harder to see any redeeming aspect in the Soviet response, which was purely defensive and involved bullying its own writers.

The Soviet view was that Western culture, in its late capitalist phase, was degenerate and sterile, with the practitioners of high culture alienated from a popular audience. The Soviets thought they had done better in this respect, and in one aspect of the cold war culture wars - the musical one, with Shostakovich and Prokofiev matched against Milton Babbitt and atonality - they possibly had a point.

Literature was another matter. Soviet literature was undergoing a post-Stalinist renaissance in the mid-1950s, associated with reform-minded journals such as Novy Mir ( New World), but the work that excited a Soviet public wasn't necessarily going to appeal to Western readers any more than it appealed to conservative Soviet bureaucrats. That was where the CIA and the Western mass media achieved a miracle: they turned two works of Soviet literary realism - both semi-autobiographical - into international bestsellers and their authors into Nobel Prize winners.

In the second case, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the subject was the gulag, which made the cold war relevance fairly clear, even though the work was in the "truth-telling" tradition of the Soviet thaw and had first been published in Novy Mir. But the first case, that of Boris Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago, was bizarre: how did a meandering epic novel by a Russian poet, essentially non-political and written in a style not much more modern than John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, manage to sell millions of copies in the West, and give birth to a major film?

Pasternak first came to global attention in the mid-1950s when, after failing to find a Soviet publisher for his novel, he sent it to the rich, young, eccentric, communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, in Italy. Denounced in the Soviet Union, the novel received enormous publicity abroad, partly through the CIA's efforts, and this got Pasternak in deeper trouble at home.

In 1958, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature but had to turn it down under Soviet pressure. A hate campaign followed, in which it became clear that the fact that Pasternak was a Jew, albeit from an assimilated family of Christian converts, mattered. Rejecting the option of emigration/expulsion, he stuck it out in his dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow, where he died in 1960 at the age of 70. Prudent Soviet writers stayed away from the funeral, but foreign journalists were there en masse.