The Book that
Shook the Kremlin

The manner in which Boris Pasternak’s Russian novel, Doctor Zhivago (1957), came to be published was not your standard bourgeois affair involving manuscripts sent by certified mail to charming book agents who host long, wet lunches; quite the contrary. As the journalist noted in the attached article:

“The circumstances under which Doctor Zhivago came to the West have evoked almost as much controversy as the book itself.”

It is an intriguing story involving the duplicity of one Italian communist who deceived oodles of Soviet functionaries favoring that the work be buried forever:

“That this forceful statement of faith in the human spirit came out of Communist Russia was a miracle. That it has helped readers to find themselves is another. That it raised doubts among the Communist faithful that may never be stilled is perhaps the greatest miracle of all.”

The censorious Soviet bureaucrats referred to the books as “a squalid, malicious work full of hatred for socialism.”