The Zhivago Affair

The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book

Author Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

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The Zhivago Affair is the dramatic, never-before-told story—drawing on newly declassified files—of how a forbidden book became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West.

In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout went to a village outside Moscow to visit Russia’s greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the manuscript of Pasternak’s only novel, suppressed by Soviet authorities. From there the life of this extraordinary book entered the realm of the spy novel. The CIA published a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago and smuggled it into the Soviet Union. Copies were devoured in Moscow and Leningrad, sold on the black market, and passed from friend to friend. Pasternak’s funeral in 1960 was attended by thousands who…

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April 28, 2015

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Peter Finn is the national security editor at The Washington Postand the co-author of The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction.

More by Peter Finn

The Zhivago Affair

Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

Petra Couvée is a writer and translator and teaches at Saint Petersburg State University.

The Zhivago Affair (written with Peter Finn) is her first full-length work.