The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

This is a fictionalized version of the story of Doctor Zhivago and the CIA's use of it--funnily enough, there is a non-fiction book about part of this story, The CIA Book Club that you can follow up with if you want the more factual version. This is two stories, one from the Russian side and one from the American side, and they are woven together. At the height of the cold war, the CIA ran an initiative known as “cultural diplomacy”. Following the premise that “great art comes from true freedom”, the agency seized on painting, music and literature as effective tools for promoting the western world’s values, and funded abstract expressionism exhibitions and jazz tours. But when it came to the country that produced Tolstoy, Pushkin and Gogol – a nation that, might value literature like the Americans value freedom (or at least we used to) – the focus was always going to be on the written word. And her subject, the part the CIA played in bringing Boris Pasternak’s masterpiece Doctor Zhivago to worldwide recognition, was the jewel in cultural diplomacy’s crown. In 1955 rumours began to circulate that Pasternak, hitherto known largely as a poet, having survived a heart attack and Stalin’s purges, was ailing and politically compromised but had nonetheless managed to finish his magnum opus. The sweeping, complex historical epic – and simple love story – that is Doctor Zhivago had been a decade in the writing under the most adverse circumstances imaginable: the imprisonment of Pasternak’s lover, Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya; the death in the gulag of his friend and fellow writer Osip Mandelstam and the suicides of two others in his circle, Paolo Iashvili and Marina Tsvetaeva; constant surveillance and his own ill health. Because of its subversive emphasis on the individual and its critical stance on the October Revolution, no publishing house in the Eastern bloc would touch it. It was smuggled out by an Italian publishing house and this is the story of what happened to get it back into Russia. It is a well told story, and one that lays out why women who were of great use during the war and then discarded in the peace might have been tempted with becoming double agents for oh so many reasons.