MOSCOW, April 8 (RIA Novosti) – The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) attempted to plant seeds of doubt among Soviet citizens by printing and distributing Boris Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago,” which was banned in the USSR during the Cold War, according to Peter Finn, who recently obtained internal CIA memos on the matter.
“They also believed that over time ideas would have a corrosive effect on Soviet power and ideology,” Finn, a national security correspondent for the Washington Post, told RIA Novosti on Monday.
Finn shared his experience of obtaining the disclosed information with RIA Novosti.
“I requested the documents from the CIA. Between the first request and when I got them it took three years,” Finn said.
“Strangely, nobody asked to disclose these documents before,” he said. “The historians there decided there was no reason to hold them back.”
During the Cold War, the CIA printed hundreds of different books, which were distributed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Finn said, adding that the agency attempted to disseminate up to 10 million books and magazines.
“That obviously is a huge effort that probably cost millions of dollars every year,” he noted.
The file on Doctor Zhivago consists of about 130 documents, which describe how the CIA got the book from British intelligence services and then worked with Dutch spy agencies to print the novel in the Netherlands. The documents also describe a miniature paperback edition that could fit in a pocket.
“They were then distributed at the World Youth Festival in Vienna as well as given to Western tourists who were visiting the Soviet Union,” Finn said.
The correspondent stressed that Pasternak had nothing to do with the CIA’s actions.
“Pasternak eventually did see a copy of the first CIA edition and he was very unhappy with it," Finn explained. "He thought it was full of mistakes."
CIA Uses Propaganda to Subvert Other Countries, For Example in Ukraine
The CIA’s involvement in the printing of Doctor Zhivago while it was banned in the Soviet Union is one of the common tools used by the agency in subverting other countries, Scott Rickard, a former American intelligence linguist told RIA Novosti.
“They were trying to achieve the ability to create the same kinds of events that they are creating in Ukraine,” Rickard said. “They get an opposition inside the country that will work with the Americans and American allies, whereby they can actually achieve their goals of bringing down another empire.”
He stressed that this particular incident by the CIA is an unfortunate black eye on American history and called such foreign policy ideological warfare.
“It’s really a counter-intelligence mechanism, and they have been using it not only on foreign governments but also on their own population,” Rickard asserted.
He noted that a banned book is one of the easiest ways to subvert a nation.
“It was a way to sort of litmus test individuals to see if they were potentially going to be a target for providing support to the West within the Soviet Union,” Rickard went on. “These poor individuals were just being incredibly manipulated because it was being done by the same people who financed the overthrow of the tsars.”
Peter Finn and Petra Couvée received the declassified documents from the CIA during their research for their book “The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book,” which is to be published June 17.
Doctor Zhivago, written by Russian poet Boris Pasternak, was first published in 1957 in Italy. The novel takes place in Russia following the 1905 revolution and tells the story of physician and poet Yuri Zhivago. The book was not welcomed by Soviet officials, who denied its publication in the USSR due to its ambivalent stance on the October Revolution.
Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958.
