Where some saw literary promise, the CIA saw valuable propaganda: publication of the novel would be a “possible blow to those who have insisted that Soviets enjoy internal freedom for expression and enjoyment of arts,” a cable to the agency’s director claimed.

The suppression, the cable went on to say, could galvanize public intellectuals like “Picasso[,] Roberson[,] Chaplin[,] Beauvoir[,] et al.” to denounce the USSR. And if they didn’t, “their refusals might…repudiate their fast and future pronouncements.” Win-win.

So, a Dutch publication house was found, the first run of 1,000 novels was rushed for distribution at the 1958 Brussels world’s fair, and a later 9,000 miniature Russian copies were designed and published. “The book was designed so that it could be easily concealed and fits inside a man’s suit or trouser pocket,” a 1959 CIA cable wrote.

The book was an international bestseller. Khrushchev and the communist party were furious—ever more so when Pasternak was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, which he was forced to decline.

Fellow writers were pressured to repudiate him. Vladimir Semichastny, the future KGB leader who was then head of the Komsomol, the youth division of the communist party, declared Pasternak unworthy of comparison with even a pig, for “a pig never defiles the place where it eats, never defiles the place where it sleeps” in a speech that was said to have been written by Khrushchev himself.

Pasternak was mortified, and would succumb to lung cancer months later in 1960. His family later accepted the Nobel Prize on his behalf in 1989.

And that’s the story behind those 100 Cyrillic characters.

Idrees M. Kahloon ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is an applied mathematics concentrator in Dunster House.