The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book

In Soviet Russia in 1956, Boris Pasternak's novel Dr Zhivago was seen as an assault on the 1917 Revolution. The manuscript was taken out of the USSR and published first in Italy, then around the world. It was also published in Russian by the CIA and smuggled back into the Soviet Union. Pasternak became not only a Nobel Laureate, but the first of Russia's great writer-dissidents. Drawing on recently declassified files, this is the dramatic story of how Dr Zhivago became a secret weapon in an ideological war.