ROOM CHANGE: This event will now take place in the 5th Floor Conference Room

Washington History Seminar
Historical Perspectives on International and National Affairs

The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book

Peter Finn
WASHINGTON POST

In The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book, Peter Finn and Petra Couvée bring readers intimately close to the charming, passionate, and complex artist that was Boris Pasternak. First to obtain CIA files providing concrete proof of the agency’s involvement, the authors give us a literary thriller that takes us back to a fascinating period of the Cold War—to a time when literature had the power to stir the world.

Peter Finn holds a B.A. in History and Politics and an M.A. in Political Science from University College Dublin, Ireland, as well as an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University. He is a National Security correspondent for The Washington Post, where he has worked for 17 years. He was twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist for international reporting for the Post’s coverage of the wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan and won the Robert F. Kennedy journalism award and the German Marshall Fund’s Peter R. Weitz prize for his foreign reporting.  Between 1998 and 2008, he was the Post’s bureau chief in Warsaw, Berlin and Moscow.

Monday September 8, 2014
4:00 p.m. 
Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor Moynihan Board Room
Ronald Reagan Building, Federal Triangle Metro Stop

September 15: Lisa Leff (American University) on The Archive Thief

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center. It meets weekly during the academic year. See www.nationalhistorycenter.org for the schedule, speakers, topics, and dates as well as webcasts and podcasts. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for its support.