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- First published in Italy in 1958, Doctor Zhivago was not released in the Soviet Union until 1989. The story of Yuri Zhivago, it outlined the history of the Russian Revolution and aftermath not as an epochal event for humanity but as a complicated event registered in the soul of a man who was very much an individual. Soviet logic demanded that it be banned. American cold war logic demanded that the book be embraced, though to celebrate it merely as propaganda was to do Pasternak the writer a terrible disservice. Pasternak’s real achievement, in Zhivago, had been to liberate himself from politics. Yet such liberation was inevitably a political act in the Soviet Union, and it was a political act outside the Soviet Union as well. “One of the great events in man’s literary and moral history,” according to Edmund Wilson, Doctor Zhivago was also the blunt object of cold war struggle, regarded with sustained attention by heads of state, by heads of the secret police and by the heads of intelligence services.