CIA Quotes Doctor Zhivago Author in First Tweet in Russian

WASHINGTON, January 16 (Sputnik) — The CIA wrote its first foreign language tweet in Russian on Thursday, quoting the Nobel Prize winning Russian writer of Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak, according to the agency’s Twitter feed.

"I wrote the novel in order for it to be published and read, and that remains my only desire," the CIA wrote in Russian on its Twitter feed, quoting Pasternak.

The Russian tweet was one of 11 on Thursday highlighting a CIA-run secret Cold War program to disseminate Doctor Zhivago in the Soviet Union after it was suppressed and denied publication in the late 1950s. Details of the program are described in 99 declassified documents released by the CIA last year.

The CIA describes the project as “one of many CIA-supported covert publishing programs that involved distributing banned books, periodicals, pamphlets, and other materials to intellectuals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.”

A CIA memo said that “Pasternak’s humanistic message—that every person is entitled to a private life and deserves respect as a human being, irrespective of the extent of his political loyalty or contribution to the state—poses a fundamental challenge to the Soviet ethic of sacrifice of the individual to the Communist System.”

The CIA first joined the social media website Twitter in June, 2014 saying “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet,” a reference to a common response to questions on intelligence matters.