"During Cold War, CIA used ‘Doctor Zhivago’ as a tool..." Topic

… to undermine Soviet Union.

"A secret package arrived at CIA headquarters in January 1958. Inside were two rolls of film from British intelligence — pictures of the pages of a Russian-language novel titled "Doctor Zhivago."

The book, by poet Boris Pasternak, had been banned from publication in the Soviet Union. The British were suggesting that the CIA get copies of the novel behind the Iron Curtain. The idea immediately gained traction in Washington.

"This book has great propaganda value," a CIA memo to all branch chiefs of the agency's Soviet Russia Division stated, "not only for its intrinsic message and thought-provoking nature, but also for the circumstances of its publication: we have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country in his own language for his own people to read."

The memo is one of more than 130 newly declassified CIA documents that detail the agency's secret involvement in the printing of "Doctor Zhivago" — an audacious plan that helped deliver the book into the hands of Soviet citizens who later passed it friend to friend, allowing it to circulate in Moscow and other cities in the Eastern Bloc. The book's publication and, later, the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Pasternak triggered one of the great cultural storms of the Cold War…"
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What a good movie! (smile).

Amicalement
Armand

Sometimes the CIA does something right.

Without the book, we wouldn't have had the movie.

Without the movie, we wouldn't have had these images:

Sigh!

That was actually a very very interesting article…

much appreciated !!

Francisco

Happy you enjoyed it Francisco!. (smile).

Amicalement
Armand

STRELNIKOV!

This is one of those movies that makes me want to play RCW.

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

"First published in Italy in 1958, Doctor Zhivago was not released in the Soviet Union until 1989. The story of Yuri Zhivago, it outlined the history of the Russian Revolution and aftermath not as an epochal event for humanity but as a complicated event registered in the soul of a man who was very much an individual. Soviet logic demanded that it be banned. American cold war logic demanded that the book be embraced, though to celebrate it merely as propaganda was to do Pasternak the writer a terrible disservice. Pasternak's real achievement, in Zhivago, had been to liberate himself from politics. Yet such liberation was inevitably a political act in the Soviet Union, and it was a political act outside the Soviet Union as well. "One of the great events in man's literary and moral history," according to Edmund Wilson, Doctor Zhivago was also the blunt object of cold war struggle, regarded with sustained attention by heads of state, by heads of the secret police and by the heads of intelligence services.

Peter Finn, a journalist at The Washington Post, and Petra Couvee, a Russian academic, trace the history of this singular novel in The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle of a Forbidden Book. Their riveting, well-researched book reads like a literary thriller: the cloak (espionage), the dagger (persecution), and the pen (literature) combined in ways that only the cold war could have made possible…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

"Thinking out of the Box" is a good thing for agencies like the CIA … Remember how some of the the US hostages in Iran were exfiled by a CIA operative using the cover of making a Sci-fi show in the movie "ARGO" …