The Zhivago Affair: Facts and Fables

In 1958, the CIA arranged a secret printing of Doctor Zhivago in the Netherlands, and became the first publisher of Boris Pasternak’s epic novel in Russian. Doctor Zhivago had been banned in the Soviet Union where the authorities regarded it as an insidious assault on the Communist state. Copies of the CIA edition soon found their way back into the USSR, where they were sold on the black market and passed around surreptitiously. This lecture will be given by author Petra Couvee.