The Zhivago File

Am I a gangster or murderer?
Or for what crime do I stand before the whole world?

      A film about the extraordinary love story between Boris Pasternak Russia's great writer, and Olga Ivinskoya, who lived a life of fear and insecurity. Olga was imprisoned and tortured by the KGB. Pasternak - a poet in post-revolutionary Soviet Russia - had to walk a very delicate line between obeying the dictates of the all-encompassing State and those of his own artistic conscience. This went directly against the prevailing credo of Lenin and the Bolsheviks which saw human life and lives in totally socialist terms of world revolution, inspiring ordinary people to sweat for the Communist cause.

After the end of WWII, he finally began writing his masterpiece Doctor Zhivago. He finished the novel by 1956, and it was published in the West after being smuggled out of the Soviet Union. It is the story of one man and his mistress who together try to insulate their private lives from the chaos and violence of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War that followed.

      As a consequence of the worldwide success of Doctor Zhivago , Pasternak lived the rest of his days in Russia in an especially precarious position - especially after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958 (most embarrassing for the Soviet government).

"Writers have always occupied a special position in Russia," explains Vitaly Shentalinsky, "because for lack of democratic institutions, the Russian writer has never been just an artist, but a spokesmen for the truth and a public conscience as well."

Why is it that the voice of Josef Stalin - an absolute dictator who sent millions and millions to their deaths - speaks less loudly to us today than the voices of the poets Mandelstam, Ahmatova, Tsvetaeva , Gumilyov, and Pasternak!

Even as these poets had little or no power or influence in their lives! As they almost without exception died young and unnaturally! They were put against a wall and shot by the secret police, found themselves exiled to die in the Gulag, despaired and died of suicide. Thousands braved official disapproval or worse to attend Pasternak's funeral at the Peredelkino writers' settlement near Moscow. His villa and grave are still places of pilgrimage for Russians today.

      Doctor Zhivago was not published in Russia until 1988.