The CIA’s ‘Zhivago’

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Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya at hisdacha in Peredelkino, late 1950s

Michael ScammellJULY 10, 2014 ISSUE

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

by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée

Pantheon, 352 pp., $26.95

Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak’s Masterpiece

by Paolo Mancosu

Milan: Feltrinelli, 402 pp., €40.00

In its headquarters in Langley,Virginia, the CIA has a museumthat’s not generally open to thepublic. The museum’s function,according to its website, is to“inform, instruct and inspire”members of the CIA as theypractice the craft of intelligence.Among its prize exhibits, alongsidethe Enigma encryption machine, asemi-submersible submarine, andOsama bin Laden’s AK-47, is anunassuming paperback bookmeasuring five-and-a-half incheshigh, three-and-a-half inches wide,and three quarters of an inch thick.It’s a pocket edition of BorisPasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, sixhundred pages printed on bible paper for smuggling purposes.The caption reads: “Copy of the original Russian-languageedition of Doctor Zhivago, covertly published by the CIA. Thefront cover and the binding identify the book in Russian; theback of the book states that it was printed in France.”

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So far as I know, it’s the only literary exhibit in the museumand its presence in such incongruous surroundings indicates theimportance the CIA once placed on “soft” warfare andpropaganda, though when exactly the book was put there andinformation about it released online is not clear. For over half acentury the CIA kept totally quiet about its involvement withDoctor Zhivago and only very recently admitted to it. Perhapsit was in 2009, when the Russian journalist and broadcasterIvan Tolstoy published The Laundered Novel: Doctor Zhivagobetween the KGB and the CIA, the first serious investigation ofthe subject for many years. The museum’s caption refers toTolstoy’s book as “alleging that the CIA had secretly arrangedfor the publication of a limited-run, Russian-language edition ofDoctor Zhivago,” but coyly adds (as if the museum had noconnection with its bosses), “the CIA officially declined tocomment on Tolstoy’s conclusions.”

Perhaps that will change now, with the publication of two newbooks, Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures ofPasternak’s Masterpiece by Paolo Mancosu, and especiallyThe Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Overa Forbidden Book by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée. Theauthors of both books describe in great detail the way the CIAsuccessfully covered its tracks and the mechanisms it used toget a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago published inEurope with great speed, but Finn and Couvée have a trumpcard in the form of a collection of “approximately 135”declassified CIA documents that reveal the thinking behind theoperation and the many missteps in carrying out what was tillthen a completely unfamiliar enterprise. There is a vastliterature about Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago, and much of ithas referred to the CIA’s involvement in the novel’spublication either in passing or at length, but no one haspreviously had access to firsthand material of this nature.Fortunately, Finn and Couvée’s book is about far more than theCIA. They cover every aspect of the Zhivago affair in detail,from Pasternak’s early life and the origins of his novel to thebombshell of its first publication in 1957, the nature of theCIA’s intervention, and the aftermath for Pasternak and hisassociates.

t took Pasternak half a lifetime to write Doctor Zhivago. A

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poet of genius in his youth, he had less facility with prose, yetdecided early in his career that he wanted to write a “big,”nineteenth-century style novel “with a love intrigue and aheroine in it—like Balzac.” His subject would be the Februaryand October revolutions and the civil war between Reds andWhites, all of which he had lived through and experiencedpersonally. He made a start on the novel in 1932, when he wasstill sanguine about the revolution’s outcome, but destroyedmost of what he had written when Stalin’s Great Terror and thepurges put an end to his optimism and made it too dangerous towrite down his true thoughts at all.

Pasternak had two brushes with Stalin during the next fewyears, the first in 1934, when Stalin phoned him out of the blueto ask his opinion of Osip Mandelstam, newly arrested forcomposing a biting epigram about the dictator. Pasternak knewthe epigram, but waffled so much in his reply that Stalinapparently accused him of not sufficiently sticking up for afriend. As news of their conversation raced around thegrapevine, some accused him of cowardice, thoughMandelstam and his wife, Nadezhda, didn’t agree. Later, whenPasternak’s name appeared on a list of people to be executed,Stalin apparently said contemptuously, “Leave the ‘holy fool’[a sobriquet that has also been translated as ‘cloud-dweller’]alone.”

Pasternak deliberately cultivated an image of modesty andotherworldliness (“what century is it outside?” was an oft-quoted line from one of his poems) and played possumthroughout the purges, surviving while preserving his integrity,a rare feat in those times. It seemed unlikely that the cloud-dweller would toss a bomb as explosive as Doctor Zhivago intothe stagnant Soviet pool a couple of decades later, but hisexperiences with Stalin, especially the Mandelstam affair, andother compromises he made during the Terror left a residue ofguilt and remorse that certainly figured among his motives.

Pasternak returned to his novel in 1946, encouraged by thebrief easing of Soviet repression during World War II and adeep patriotism that impelled him to speak out. Anotherpowerful stimulus that year was his encounter in the offices ofthe literary magazine Novy Mir with a young editor andtranslator named Olga Ivinskaya. Pasternak, fifty-six and

married to his second wife, Zinaida, with two sons at home, wascompletely dazzled by Olga’s movie star looks and smolderingsensuality. She was ardent, talented, energetic, and—unlike hiswife—passionate about literature. “My life, my angel, I loveyou truly,” he wrote soon after meeting her, showering her withbooks and letters and extravagant compliments. Olga, twenty-two years his junior and a single mother, with two youngchildren of her own, was awed and flattered by the famouspoet’s attentions. Encountering Pasternak, she wrote in hermemoir, was like meeting a god.

Soon they were taking long walks together, then they werelovers, and before long, Olga became Pasternak’s unofficialsecretary and personal assistant as well, for which she was topay dearly. In 1949 she was arrested for “anti-Soviet politicalactivities” (Pasternak himself was too famous to be touched)and sentenced to five years in the Gulag—reduced to four asthe result of the Stalin amnesty in 1953. Many thought she andPasternak would split up after that, but Olga had apparentlymiscarried Pasternak’s child in prison, and in addition to feelingguilty about her incarceration, he felt she had saved his life byrefusing to betray him during lengthy interrogations by theKGB. He wrote their relationship into Doctor Zhivago, andincluded many of the poems he dedicated to her in the twenty-six he appended to the novel.

By 1954 the novel was finished. Its plot, too convoluted tosummarize in any detail, follows the life and wanderings of YuriZhivago, a dreamy young doctor swept up in World War I, thenthe revolution, then the civil war, while moving back and forthbetween European Russia and western Siberia. Through a seriesof coincidences he has repeated encounters with a young nurse,Larissa (Lara) Guichard, and though both are married, theyembark on a passionate affair. They are separated whenZhivago is kidnapped by Red partisans during the civil war andforced to serve as their medical officer. Released at the end ofthe war, Yuri spends some idyllic months with Lara, beforepersuading her to travel to eastern Siberia, while he returns toMoscow and has two children with another woman beforedying of a heart attack. Lara manages to attend the funeral andis then arrested and flung into the Gulag. The novel ends withtwo family friends meeting an orphaned laundry girl during

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World War II and concluding that she is the daughter of Yuriand Lara.

asternak submitted Doctor Zhivago to Novy Mir and thejournal Znamya in early 1956, and it was months before a replycame back, partly because the KGB had to be given time toinvestigate Pasternak’s counterrevolutionary views and partlybecause discussions of the novel had gone all the way up to thePresidium of the Party’s Central Committee, where it wascharacterized as “a malicious libel.” In September 1956Pasternak received a formal letter signed by five members ofNovy Mir’s editorial board offering a detailed analysis of theplot and explaining what was wrong with it. Pasternak wasjudged to be alienated from the society he lived in and anti-Soviet in his views, and there could be no question ofpublishing his novel.

Meanwhile, rumors of the novel’s existence had spread far andwide among literary circles, and soon a young Italian journalist,Sergio d’Angelo, came calling at Pasternak’s dacha to ask if hewould consider having it published in Italy. The proposedpublisher was a Communist, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, whichwould make it more palatable, in d’Angelo’s view. Pasternakwasn’t convinced by the argument, but eventually handed theyoung man a typescript, adding with a grim laugh, “You arehereby invited to my execution” (translated by d’Angelo as“face the firing squad”).

D’Angelo carried off the prized text, setting off a months-longcorrespondence between Pasternak and Feltrinelli, carried onclandestinely through a variety of intermediaries, with theactive participation of Ivinskaya. Much, but not all of it, wasintercepted and copied by the KGB. The Soviet authorities,through the Writers’ Union, brought immense pressure onPasternak to get the novel back, and the Italian CommunistParty put pressure on Feltrinelli. There were even promises of asuitably toned-down version being published in the SovietUnion, but it was too late. Pasternak told Isaiah Berlin, whowas appalled by his action and tried to dissuade him, that hewas ready to sacrifice his life if necessary. He was sodetermined that he gave Berlin a copy to take back to Englandwith him, secretly smuggled another copy to Jacqueline de

ITAR-TASS

Proyart, a Russian-speaking friend in France, and gave a fourthto George Katkov (a prominent émigré historian also based inEngland). By now Pasternak almost didn’t care who publishedhis novel, as long as it appeared in print somewhere.

The nature of Pasternak’s anguish, frustration, and joy over thecomplex negotiations needed to realize his dream can be seenin Paolo Mancosu’s Inside the Zhivago Storm, which gives usthe complete correspondence between Pasternak and Feltrinellifor the first time. Pasternak’s torments are paralleled by theyoung Feltrinelli’s less mortal but still stormy combat with theItalian Communist Party, and their emotional letters add up to anonfictional epistolary novel that is a treasure house forPasternak scholars. Feltrinelli rushed the Italian translation ofDoctor Zhivago to market in November 1957, and translationsinto English, French, German, and other languages followed inthe spring of 1958.

Anna Akhmatova with Boris Pasternak just after he began writing Doctor Zhivago, 1946

While the Soviet authorities maintained a tightlipped silence on

the subject, Doctor Zhivago spent the next six months on theNew York Times best-seller list and was an internationalsensation. It seemed to have everything: peace, war, revolution,civil war, a wide variety of settings, and a huge cast ofcharacters, just like the books of Pasternak’s literary hero, LevTolstoy. With an illicit love affair at its center, the novelappeared to roll War and Peace and Anna Karenina into one,but it presented critics with a quandary. Even before it waspublished, Kornei Chukovsky called it “alien, confusing andremoved from my life,” and Akhmatova echoed his verdict. “Itis my time, my society, but I don’t recognize it,” she said, “It isa failure of genius.”

Vladimir Nabokov, one of the few critics in the West to agreewith them, notoriously derided Doctor Zhivago as “a sorrything, clumsy, trite and melodramatic, with stock situations,voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, romantic robbers andtrite coincidences,” and from the literary point of view he wasright. But that wasn’t really the point of the novel’s fame orsuccess. Nabokov’s old friend and literary sparring partner,Edmund Wilson, put his finger on the matter (and had thepleasure of contradicting Nabokov once again) when heemphasized Doctor Zhivago’s political and historicalimportance, and the symbolic significance of Pasternak writingsuch a book inside the Soviet Union, publishing it abroad, andsurviving. “Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand asone of the great events in man’s literary and moral history,”wrote Wilson. “Nobody could have written it in a totalitarianstate and turned it loose on the world who did not have thecourage of genius.”

Content, rather than art, is the key to Doctor Zhivago’simportance. “Revolutionaries who take the law into their ownhands are horrifying, not as criminals, but as machines thathave gotten out of control, like a runaway train,” says theautobiographically rooted Zhivago to Lara at one point, andwhen Lara remarks, “You’ve changed, you know. You used tospeak more calmly about the revolution,” he rejoins, “Thosewho inspired the revolution aren’t at home in anything exceptchange and turmoil…because they haven’t any real capacities,they are ungifted.” Still later he comments:

Revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-

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track minds, men who are narrow-minded to the point ofgenius. They overturn the old order in a few hours ordays…but for decades thereafter, for centuries, the spirit ofnarrowness which led to the upheaval is worshipped asholy.

The novel’s main action ends in 1929, suggesting that thedecades of narrowness started then, and it reads like a requiemfor Russian politics and Russian culture. Nothing like it hadbeen seen in the Soviet Union since the early 1920s and it’s nowonder the authorities regarded Pasternak and his novel asanti-Soviet.

he CIA quickly came to a similar conclusion. Less than amonth after Doctor Zhivago’s appearance in Italy in November1957, a CIA memo cited an expert’s view that it was “moreimportant than any other literature which has yet come out ofthe Soviet Bloc,” and that care should be taken not to harmPasternak in taking advantage of its publication. In earlyJanuary the agency received two rolls of microfilm from Britishintelligence, a photographic replica of Feltrinelli’s originalmanuscript, and began to ponder how to use them.

The timing was propitious, for as Finn and Couvée point out,the CIA had a large number of officials who had strong literarycredentials and loved books. They believed in the power ofideas, and agreed with the CIA’s chief of covert action that“books differ from all other propaganda media primarilybecause one single book can significantly change the reader’sattitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact ofany other single medium.” Crass and reductive as the sentimentmay be, it acknowledges an important aspect of literature thatcannot be denied. Ironically, the idea seems to have beenborrowed from the Soviets themselves, who were guided byMaxim Gorky’s 1934 dictum (itself reflecting centuries ofRussian attitudes) that books are weapons, “the most importantand most powerful weapons in socialist culture.” The Sovietswere already masters of propaganda and the manipulation ofculture in the 1930s, as George Kennan, author of containmentand the intellectual father of the cold war, well knew.

Kennan’s ideas had led to the foundation of the Congress for

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Cultural Freedom in 1950, and in 1956, just before theappearance of Doctor Zhivago, the device of mailing Americanbooks and magazines across the iron curtain was beginning tobe tried. The next step was a small program to translateWestern books into Russian, which functioned alongside amultimillion-dollar enterprise to publish and or distributethousands of titles in Soviet-controlled countries. Finn andCouvée estimate that up to ten million books and magazineswere clandestinely smuggled into the Soviet bloc in this way. Itwas an effort much less known to the public and much lesscontroversial than cold war cultural activities in the West,although some argue that the problem was the CIA and secrecyitself the offense. The authors respond that in 1950s Americano other agency could have done it, for it would have beenimpossible to get Congress to openly appropriate money for thesupport of art and culture, especially when most of the moneywent to institutions and publications with a liberal profile.

The appearance of Doctor Zhivago presented the CIA with anew kind of challenge. It was certain of the book’s “greatpropaganda value,” but mailing an English translation of thenovel into the Soviet Union didn’t seem to promise manydividends, and since it had not yet appeared in Russian, itcouldn’t simply be reprinted. It decided to publish its own“black” edition, but that presented problems too. The Britishasked the CIA not to print the book in America in order not toharm Pasternak, and Pasternak had sent word that no Russianémigrés should be involved either.

The chosen solution was to farm out the job to a New Yorkpublisher named Felix Morrow, a former Trotskyite, journalist,and author, passionately anti-Communist, who also had asecurity clearance. On June 23, 1958, a contract was signedwith Morrow requiring him to prepare the Russian manuscriptof Doctor Zhivago for typesetting and to produce two sets ofphoto-offset proofs by July 31. The goal was to have copies ofthe book printed in Europe in time to distribute them to Sovietvisitors to the Brussels International World Fair in September,and also to give copies to sailors on ships bound for the SovietUnion.

It was a harebrained scheme and it ran into numerous problems.Morrow welcomed the assignment as “an astonishing and

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attractive task,” but drove an extremely hard bargain over hisfee, blabbed about what he was up to, and couldn’t find aEuropean printer. Failing to blackmail the CIA into buying alarge number of printed copies at inflated prices, he sent a copyof the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago to an old friend at theUniversity of Michigan Press with a suggestion that theypublish it instead. He was convinced, he later wrote, that “theRussian desk at the CIA was, at the least, not much interestedin the success of this task” and was dragging its feet. Beforelong, Michigan was offering copies of a planned edition tomembers of the US government and to the CIA itself, andofficials had to scramble to get the university to hold off.

The reason for the delays was problems in finding a Europeanpublisher, where another comedy of errors unfolded. The CIAturned for help to the Dutch intelligence service, BVD.Feltrinelli was rumored to be bringing out a Russian editionwith the Dutch academic publishing company Mouton, andwhen it turned out that Feltrinelli was in no hurry to act, theCIA and BVD decided to go ahead without him. The director ofthe local branch of Paix et Liberté, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Communist, was asked to bring the proofs to Mouton, and adeal was struck to print a rush edition of Doctor Zhivago of justover a thousand copies (1,160, to be precise). At the lastmoment a Mouton employee, under the impression that thiswas the Feltrinelli project, pasted on a slip identifying Feltrinellias the publisher.

The books were ready by early September, just in time for theBrussels Universal and International Exposition, and about athird were distributed through the Vatican pavilion:

Soon the book’s blue linen covers were found littering thefairgrounds. Some who got the novel were ripping off thecover, dividing the pages, and stuffing them in their pocketsto make the book easier to hide.

A CIA memo concluded that “this phase can be consideredcompleted successfully,” though its success was qualified.Feltrinelli was furious that his name had been used andsuspected outright fraud, unable to imagine the cause as aninnocent misunderstanding. The CIA kept mum, Mouton issuedan abject apology and agreed to print an additional five

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thousand copies for Feltrinelli, and the University of MichiganPress went ahead with its own edition in early 1959.

Pasternak won the Nobel Prize at the end of 1958 and wasdenounced by the head of the Komsomol, VladimirSemichastny, as “a pig fouling its own sty” who should bekicked out of the Soviet Union to “breathe capitalist air.” Anailing Pasternak, fearing deportation, rejected the prize, and ayear later he died of lung cancer. Ivinskaya was arrested andsentenced for a second time (with her daughter, Irina) to eightyears in the Gulag for “foreign currency manipulations,” butreleased after four. In 1965 David Lean released hisblockbuster movie of Doctor Zhivago, starring Omar Sharif asZhivago and Julie Christie as Lara, which far more peopleremember than the novel (on Google the movie comes beforethe book), and in 1978 Ivinskaya published a best-sellingmemoir of her years with Pasternak.

ince then there has been an avalanche of books on one oranother aspect of the Zhivago affair. Mancosu lists over 150titles in his bibliography; Finn and Couvée list 184. It wasTolstoy’s flawed 2009 book, The Laundered Novel, that set offthe subgenre devoted to the machinations of the CIA. The bestand most accurate of those accounts before Finn and Couvée isto be found in Mancosu’s chapter two, a tour de force ofliterary detection worthy of a scholarly Sherlock Holmes. I feelsorry for him over his timing, but the detail he offers, togetherwith the Pasternak–Feltrinelli correspondence, offers adifferent angle on the episode.

Meanwhile Finn and Couvée have written a fascinating bookthat is thoroughly researched, extraordinarily accurate in itsfactual details, judicious in its judgments, and destined toremain the definitive work on the subject for a very long timeto come. Though it will be advertised and sold on the basis ofthe declassified material from the CIA, only two of its sixteenchapters are devoted to that subject; the rest cover every aspectof the creation of Doctor Zhivago and its consequences in richand convincing detail. I was particularly impressed by their fairtreatment of Olga Ivinskaya, who after Pasternak’s death wasviciously attacked not only by the government but also by somemembers of Pasternak’s family and friends. My only wish is

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that they had delved a little more deeply into the love affairbetween Pasternak and Ivinskaya and the details of Pasternak’sstrange ménage-à-trois, but perhaps that calls for a novelistrather than a journalist.

Also largely missing is an assessment of Pasternak’s historicachievement. Finn and Couvée refer briefly to literarysuccessors such as Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sinyavsky, YuliDaniel, and Joseph Brodsky, but Pasternak’s feat had epoch-making repercussions in ways that deserve more notice. Insending his book for publication abroad, for example, hedeliberately broke Soviet law and acted in a way unthinkablesince the punishment of Boris Pilnyak, the last person to do thesame, in 1929. Pasternak thus punched a huge hole in the ironcurtain and Soviet censorship. By surviving legally unscathedhe also set a precedent for behavior that had not been seensince the late 1920s, and Doctor Zhivago became in essencethe first serious example of samizdat. Solzhenitsyn oncecriticized Pasternak for rejecting the Nobel Prize, but it’s likelythat without Pasternak, he would have had a far harder timegetting One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich published, letalone surviving to win the Nobel Prize himself. Pasternak wasthe true father of the Soviet dissident movement andsinglehandedly influenced the course of the cold war.

As for the CIA, the publication of Doctor Zhivago in Russianand the smuggling of copies into the Soviet Union contributedto the novel as a samizdat phenomenon, but it had nothing to dowith Pasternak’s fame or him winning the Nobel Prize. TheKGB and the Soviet government’s noisy campaign ofrepression did much more to help than the CIA. It was theCIA’s future books program that gained most from theexperiment. Meanwhile the CIA’s error-prone approach to itspublications hasn’t entirely changed. The book on display in theCIA Museum is not a copy of “the original Russian-languageedition of Doctor Zhivago,” but a later edition, in paper ratherthan hard cover, and brought out by an entirely differentpublisher.

The CIA does admit escorted groups of visitors to the museum from time to time, but not the public at large. ↩

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Disclosure: I have a copy of the declassified CIA documents as well and was planning to write a book about “the Zhivago

affair” myself until Finn and Couvée came along. I occasionally refer to these documents directly rather than via Finn and

Couvée’s text. ↩

Nabokov, nine years Pasternak’s junior, has been accused of envying the older writer, and there is probably something to

that charge, for as early as 1927 he had criticized the older man’s verse style as clumsy and convoluted. Ironically, when

Doctor Zhivago was being translated into English, Nabokov was suggested as a possible translator of the poems, but

Pasternak himself turned the notion down, referring to Nabokov’s jealousy as the reason. Finn and Couvée suggest that

Nabokov feared Doctor Zhivago would knock Lolita off its perch at the top of the best-seller list, but there could be more to

it than that. Lolita is about a pubescent heroine molested and seduced by a much older man, Humbert Humbert, who has

married her mother to get access to the daughter. In the opening chapters of Doctor Zhivago, we find a pubescent Lara being

molested and then seduced (at the age of fifteen) by a middle-aged lawyer, Victor Ippolitovich Komarovsky, who has access

to her as her mother’s lover. Another parallel is to be found between the poet, Yuri Zhivago, and another poet, Fyodor

Cherdyntsev, in Nabokov’s last Russian novel, The Gift. Is it too fanciful to suggest that Pasternak’s “invitation” to

d’Angelo to watch him face “the firing squad,” may have been a subconscious reference to another of Nabokov’s Russian

novels, Invitation to a Beheading? The Russian word for “firing squad” and “beheading” is the same: kazn’, which means

“execution” in its literal sense. ↩

Pasternak himself acknowledged the novel’s deficiencies. “I have lost my artistic coherence and let myself inwardly sag,” he

wrote to a young editor when sending him some chapters. “I have written this novel in an unprofessional way…with a

dullness and naiveté for which I gave myself both permission and indulgence.” His disregard for form, he said, sprang from a

desire to move away from the sophisticated modernism of his youth to a simpler form of realism, and to place a much

greater emphasis on clarity of content than before. ↩

An entire mythology has grown up around these microfilms. Feltrinelli at various times complained about CIA

“interference,” and referred to a plane he was on being obliged to make an unscheduled landing. From this grew a story that

British intelligence, at the request of the CIA, had forced Feltrinelli’s plane from Moscow to Milan to land in Malta, and

that agents had removed the typescript of Doctor Zhivago from Feltrinelli’s suitcase and photographed it while Feltrinelli

and his fellow passengers cooled their heels in the lounge for two hours (in another version, Feltrinelli was on his way from

Italy to Holland).

Repeated at different times and by various individuals, the story received its greatest publicity after Tolstoy featured it in

his book. Mancosu and others discount the story on the grounds that Feltrinelli never made the journey from Moscow to

Milan, and that there were enough copies circulating in Britain for such derring-do not to be necessary. All agree, however,

that the CIA got their copy from the British. ↩

Ivan Tolstoy speculated that the reason for the CIA ’s haste was the need to rush out a Russian-language edition of Doctor

Zhivago in order for it to be considered by the Nobel Prize committee, and that the CIA had also pressured the committee to

give the award to Pasternak. He was wrong on both counts, but this couldn’t be confirmed until the Nobel Foundation’s

fifty-year rule of confidentiality expired soon after Tolstoy wrote. ↩

From a letter to Carl R. Proffer, founding editor of Ardis Publishers in Ann Arbor, Michigan, sent by Morrow on October 6,

1980; see Mancosu, pp. 115–116. In a later letter, dated October 20, 1980, Morrow added: “The Russian desk people at

CIA were inimical to the project…. They were either Russian agents or incredibly stupid.” ↩

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