*Ø* Blogmanac | May 30 | Did the Communists starve Pasternak?
Boris Pasternak, Russian winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, in the years leading up to his death on May 30, 1968, suffered appalling persecution by his own government. He had won the Nobel Prize, but, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn after him, was told that if he left the USSR to attend the awards ceremony he would not be permitted to return. He was even expelled from the union of Soviet writers.

Evidence that the Communist regime of the Soviet Union might have wilfully starved Boris Pasternak to death emerged in a book, Moscow: Under the Skin, written by an Italian journalist, Viro Roberti.

Roberti interviewed the great author of Dr Zhivago several times during the ordeal. On March 15, 1960, Roberti met Pasternak, who was emaciated and sickly looking. The novelist told the interviewer, ”I have been expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers so that I shall starve. No one publishes my poetry or my translations anymore, which was my daily bread. The first payments from my editor have been confiscated by order of the authorities …”

Pasternak died ten weeks later, on May 30, 1960. The monopoly State, it seems, had exercised the full logic of its power, disallowing a genius, who had been but mildly critical of communism in Dr Zhivago, the right even to eat.

(More: Schwarz, Frederick, The Three Faces of Revolution, Capitol Hill Press, Washington, 1972, 43-47)

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