The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, The CIA, and the Battle Over a Banned Book, Finn and Couvee - B

                                               Published in 1957 after a decade in the making, 'Dr. Zhivago' was awarded the Nobel Prize.  The 1965 movie received 5 Academy Awards.  The remarkable first and only novel by a 65-year-old poet, Boris Pasternak, rocked the world.  That he had survived until the thaw after Stalin's death was a surprise. "Through much of his life, Pasternak assisted people imprisoned or impoverished by the regime." He never towed the Soviet line, but in the early thirties had penned a note of sympathy at the time of the death of the dictator's wife. It is presumed that is what saved him.  Pasternak passed the novel to an Italian communist publisher in 1956. The KGB found out after the fact and began its campaign to stop the publication of the book.  For a year and a half, the Soviets tried their heavy-handed, clumsy best to stop publication, but it came in late 1957. A year later, the CIA sponsored Russian edition was distributed at the Brussels World Fair and soon later, the Nobel followed. A drumbeat of condemnation rained down on Pasternak in Soviet papers and on tv and radio.  He was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers.  Under intense pressure, he withdrew his joyful acceptance and rejected the Nobel Prize.  He penned a letter of apology to Khruschev, pleading to not be expelled from Russia.  As the book grew in worldwide popularity, he was excised from Soviet society, and died in May of 1960 at the age of 70. He was intestate and there followed thirty-years of "unseemly struggles" over his affairs. In 1989 in Stockholm, his son Yevgeny accepted the the gold medal for the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature.