FALSE FRIEND

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000303090053-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 26, 2010
• Sequence Number: 53
• Publication Date: August 18, 1980
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/26: CIA-RDP90-00552R000303090053-0
ARTICLE Arr TIME
ON PAGE 18 AUGUST 198
Books
False Friend
THE NOBEL PRIZE
by Yuri Krotkov
Translated by Linda Aldwinckle
Simon & Schuster; 348 pages; $12.95
W W hen Yuri Krotkov defected to the
West in 1963, carrying a micro-
filmed manuscript detailing his experi-
ences as a Soviet secret police agent, he
might have chosen a new career as a writ-
er of thrillers. Certainly he had enough
material in hand. One of his first assign-
ments for the KGB involved informing on
boyhood friends. Later he specialized in
the sexual entrapment of foreigners. His
job was to introduce ambassadors and at-
taches to beautiful Soviet women, known
as "swallows" in secret police parlance.
Once a diplomat was caught nesting with
a swallow, there followed a blackmail at-
tempt and-the KGB hoped-recruitment
of the victim as a Soviet agent.
Yet Krotkov seems uninterested in
writing conventional thrillers. Instead, he
has produced The Nobel Prize, a spy sto-
ry of a different kind, about Boris Pas-
ternak. According to the dust jacket,
which does not mention Krotkov's secret
police background, the author enjoyed "a
close personal friendship with the Paster-
nak family." Though such a friendship be-
tween a KGB agent and Russia's great 20th
century poet seems unlikely, Krotkov was
indeed a frequent visitor to the home of
Pasternak after he received the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1958.
T he plot turns on actual events, begin-
ning with the Nobel award. The So-
viet authorities had been outraged by the
publication abroad of Pasternak's novel,
Doctor Zhivago, which they had banned
as anti-Soviet. When the prize was an-
nounced, they launched a vast campaign
of vilification against the author.
Pasternak cabled his acceptance of
the award saying "infinitely grateful,
touched, proud, surprised, overwhelmed."
Six days later he declined it "in view of
the meaning given the award by the so-
ciety in which I live." He then wrote a let-
ter to Nikita Khrushchev pleading not to
be expelled from the U.S.S.R. In spite of
these and other concessions, the attacks
against him scarcely subsided, and he died
in disgrace in 1960 at the age of 70.
Building on these facts, Krotkov has
strained- for verisimilitude. There are
knowing touches of trivia: a mention of
the poet's favorite felt slippers, the real
names of his dogs. Bits of Pasternak's
works and quotes from the Soviet cam-
paign against him are cited with preci-
sion. Only the essence of the book is false.
Krotkov's defection from the; U.S.S.R.
seems hardly to have been for ideological
reasons, nor does he sympathize with the
poet's struggles. For his portrait of Pas-
ternak immeasurably coarsens him while
it diminishes his martyrdom. In addition,
it has reduced him to the image purveyed
by Soviet propaganda.
Pasternak is made to inveigh against
capitalism, under which "every man must
be prepared to commit any crime for the
sake of money." In the U.S.S.R., on the
other hand, "the Bolsheviks are reshaping
human nature, directing man toward a
better future." Metamorphosed into a true
Soviet patriot and Communist, the fiction-
al Pasternak has little trouble turning
down the Nobel Prize: "What if I really
am just a puppet in the hands of the im-
perialists?" In any case, he concludes, the
prize was "not worth having."
Krotkov's book even demeans one of
the most celebrated love stories of mod-
ern literary history. Olga Ivinskaya, Pas-
ternak's model for Lara in Doctor Zhi-
vago, had been the poet's companion and
secretary for 14 years. Now 68 years old
and living in Moscow, Ivinskaya has sur-
vived two terms in concentration camps
Yuri Krotkov
He was straining for verisimilitude.
for her association with the poet.
To judge by this book, Ivinskaya's fate
was well deserved. As Krotkov tells it, she
was responsible for Doctor Zhivago's pub-
lication abroad, thus causing all the trou-
bles. Pasternak is said to have repudiated
her when she supposedly pocketed some
of the novel's foreign royalties. That alle-
gation corresponds to the line taken by the
Soviets in 1960 to justify the eight-year
sentence meted out to Tvinskaya, who was
convicted on a trumped-up charge of spec-
ulating in foreign currency. .
Actually, as Pasternak's frantic letters
to friends abroad show, his greatest fear
during the terror-filled months following
the Nobel award was for Ivinskaya. "She
and her children are a kind of hostage
for me," he wrote. In large part, his re-
fusal of the Nobel Prize and his other con-
cessions had been attempts to save her.
Shortly before his death, he managed to
send a letter to the West saying: "If, God
forbid, they should arrest Olga, all toc-
sins should ring, just as would have been
done in my own case, for an attack on
her is in fact a blow at me." Twenty years
later the blows are still falling on Olga
-and on Pasternak. -By Patricia Blake
STAT
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/26: CIA-RDP90-00552R000303090053-0