The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book Peter Finn and Petra Couvee In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to a village just outside Moscow to visit Russia’s greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the original manuscript of Pasternak’s first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: “This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world.” From there the life of this extraordinary book entered the realm of the spy novel. The CIA, which recognized that the Cold War was above all an ideological battle, published a Russian-language edition of Doctor Zhivago and smuggled it into the Soviet Union. Copies were devoured in Moscow and Leningrad, sold on the black market, and passed surreptitiously from friend to friend… First to obtain newly declassified CIA files providing proof of the agency's involvement, Finn and Couvee take us back to a remarkable Cold War era when literature had the power to stir the world...