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| Hearsay: |
Doctor Zhivago was a CIA-funded cold war propaganda op.
Into one of the most sordid episodes in Russian literary history, the Soviets’ persecution of Boris Pasternak, author of “Doctor Zhivago,” a Russian historian has injected a belated piece of intrigue: the CIA as covert financier of a Russian-language edition of the epic novel.
Ivan Tolstoy, who is also a broadcaster for Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, writes in a forthcoming book that the CIA secretly arranged for the publication of a limited Russian-language edition of “Doctor Zhivago” in 1958 to help Pasternak secure the Nobel Prize in Literature that year.
“Pasternak’s novel became a tool that was used by the United States to teach the Soviet Union a lesson,” Tolstoy said in a telephone interview from Prague, where he works as a Russian commentator for the U.S. government-funded radio stations. The novelist knew nothing of the CIA’s action, according to Tolstoy and the writer’s family.
Remember the good old days when they were just looking into other peoples’ business…? Oh, wait, there were never any good old days with the CIA, were there.
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January 30th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Sure, there were good old days with the CIA except back then they spied on the Commies and left loyal Americans alone. Well, unless they thought you might also be a Commie. Their charter nowadays has them spying on terrorists. But we all know that everyone has the potential to be a terrorist and the only loyal Americans left today are Republicans.
January 30th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
It’s ironic that the publisher of Doctor Zhivago used the funds from
the publication to publish and translate the most significant handbook
on gurrella warfare and terrorism into over 60 languages. Curious, eh.
All Marxist-Leninists are familiar with a small book called the “Mini-Manual for Urban Guerrillas,” written by Carlos Marighella, a former leader of the Communist Party of Brazil. The “Mini‑Manual” gives complete instructions on every aspect of weaponry, deployment of forces, and the use of terrorism. And then it says: “The government has no alternative except to intensify repression. The police round‑ups, house searches, arrests of innocent people make life in the city unbearable. The general sentiment is that the government is unjust, incapable of solving problems, and resorts purely and simply to the physical liquidation of its opponents. …The urban guerrilla must become more aggressive and violent, resorting without let-up to sabotage, terrorism, expropriations, assaults, kidnappings, and executions, heightening the disastrous situation in which the government must act.”[22]
This same strategy was expressed in 1968 by Italian Communist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the famous millionaire publisher of the novel Doctor Zhivago, in a booklet entitled “Political Guerrilla Warfare.”
January 30th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Here’s a New Yorker article from a few years back, about the state department’s promotion of fine art in the Soviet union:
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/051017crat_atlarge