Given its literary culture, some CIA staff probably realized the irony of a powerful and well-funded government agency using clandestine methods to distribute novels by George Orwell. The American government was trying to manipulate the culture of the Soviet Union to help Soviet citizens recognize the dangers of a powerful government manipulating their culture. (Unsurprisingly, they didn’t want anyone to know they were involved.)

Nonetheless, the CIA saw “great propaganda value” in Doctor Zhivago. Partnered with Dutch intelligence agents, they arranged for an illegal printing of a Russian-language version of the novel that was distributed at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958. The agency also used its own press in Washington to print miniature pocket-sized copies; the diminutive edition was easier to smuggle.

The operation had precisely the desired impact—for better and for worse. The reported price of the Russian edition on the black market in Moscow was close to a week’s wages. When Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature, Soviet officials viciously attacked him as a traitor fawning over Western idols. Writers around the world, however, rallied to his defense, and the notoriety of the book only fueled more sales.

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American efforts at cultural engineering were generally subtler than Soviet ones; the CIA sought to promote rather than prevent the publication and dissemination of books, and the agency didn’t threaten or coerce authors into supporting a particular ideology.

That said, there are some intriguing continuities between the cultural interventions of the two Cold War superpowers.

Couvée and Finn describe a meeting with a party bureaucrat at which Pasternak lost his temper and fumed: “You have your human side, I can see, but why do you come out with these stock phrases? ‘The people! The people!’—As though it were something you could just produce from your own trouser pockets.” He was railing against the arrogance of official dogma, a belief in some infinitely pliable public that could be shaped to pre-formulated ends. Yet this, judging from the CIA’s operation to print and disseminate a pocket-sized version of Doctor Zhivago, was precisely what the agency wanted: something that could emerge from one’s trouser pockets to shape the opinions of ordinary people.

Pasternak did not think of his novel as a weapon for intellectual warfare. He referred to it as “my final happiness and madness,” hardly the phrase of someone who sees a book as a cultural grenade. He thought the work was much more than a vehicle to deliver a particular message, and he was frustrated by the way the international media always quoted the same passages to show that he was critical of the regime. He wanted his book treated as a novel, not a pamphlet.

The CIA, on the other hand, was delighted by the media spotlight on the anti-Communist passages. The CIA also recognized that the symbolism of the situation made the Soviet Union look at least as bad as the novel itself did. After accepting the Nobel Prize, Pasternak then voluntarily refused it after party officials put unbearable pressure on him and his loved ones. The image of the noble but persecuted writer, a courageous critic of a corrupt regime, created great copy for journalists and terrible publicity for the Soviet Union.