The Washington Post describes how a Nobel Prize-winning novel was used in the fight for freedom.
For many years, the American left-wing had a side business castigating the CIA for waging a “cultural war” in Europe, a propaganda offensive meant to cast the evil American Empire in a bad light, while doing everything possible to subvert the building of socialism throughout the world. In the late 90’s, British author Frances Stonor Saunders made a splash with her book The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. According to Ms. Saunders, “the American government had looked to the cultural Brahmins of the West to lend intellectual weight to its actions,” hence only harming what was one “the moral authority enjoyed by the intelligentsia,” thereby undermining and mocking it.
It is therefore good to be reminded, as we were in Sunday’s Washington Post front page story by Peter Finn and Petra Couvee, of how the Agency quickly realized the importance of Russian novelist Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, which eventually became an Oscar-winning movie directed by David Lean, and starring Julie Christie, Omar Sharif, Tom Courtenay, Alec Guinness and Rod Steiger.
This was indeed the heyday of the CIA, and the Agency executives worked quickly and appropriately to get the novel, banned in the Soviet Union, to as many Russian readers as possible. The CIA’s Soviet Russia Division noted that the novel “has great propaganda value,” and hence they had “the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by a man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country in his own language for people to read.”
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Complete text and video linked here.
