Boris Pasternak’s epic masterpiece Dr. Zhivago is above all else a political novel, designed as an attack on Soviet totalitarianism and meant to show the horror of what he called the “inhuman reign of the lie.” A recent book tells the story of how the Kremlin tried to suppress the novel, of Pasternak’s courage in the face of official intimidation, and of the role played by the CIA in getting the book published and distributed in Western Europe. When Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in 1958, the Soviet Union struck back, including by using anti-Semitism as a weapon. Algis Valiunas writes:

Straightaway [after the prize was announced] the Literaturnaya Gazeta ran a novella-length editorial of florid scurrility, headlined “A Provocative Sortie of International Reaction.” The op-ed included the entire rejection letter sent to Pasternak in 1956 that certified the official worthlessness and downright malignancy of the work and its author. The gazette had a circulation of almost 900,000 readers, and this issue sold out in a few hours. The epithet of choice for Pasternak in the Soviet press and in the mouths of the faithful soon became “Judas,” for while propagating belief in Christ might be anti-Soviet slander, everyone understood how aptly the biblical allusion fit the arch-betrayer of the Socialist Motherland, especially when the offender was [of Jewish origin].

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.