Meeting at Wiston House:

...specifically antiCommunist films suffer from the same handicap in the eyes of the film merchants...

...When asked in a radio interview why the Soviet Union facilitated the circulation in Russia of the British Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, but banned the London Times and the Guardian, Zhukov replied that only that week the Times had published an offensive cartoon of Khrushchev...

...No foreign journalist had been informed in advance when or where the trial would take place, nor was there any mention of it in the Soviet press after it was over...

...Zhivago...

...Zhukov, however, had chosen an unfortunate example to illustrate his point...

...He declared, with a note of disbelief, that he had been told that the British Government had no power to influence distributors who did not wish to show Soviet films...

...Afterward, at a press conference and on a British Broadcasting Corporation program, the Russians answered questions...

...It was on the scope of contacts in the dissemination of news and opinions, however, that the conference came up against a conflict of doctrines which no general formula could conceal...

...The occasion was the Anglo-Soviet conference held a fortnight ago at Wiston House, in the south of England...

...Though the Russian delegates implied that to question the verdict on Ivinskaya was to increase international tension—just as to award the Nobel Prize for literature to Pasternak had been an insult and provocation to the Soviet state—they were compelled to recognize the strength of feeling in England over the Ivinskaya incident...

...It is only in the West that questions about the Ivinskaya case can be raised, just as it was only in the West that Dr...

...Zhivago could be published...

...But all attempts to get the Russians to commit themselves to a clear definition of the term failed...

...He therefore appealed to the British press to apply the necessary persuasion...

...But that is precisely the trouble...

...If there is to be some kind of quantitative parity in the exchanges, it is to be an unequal trade in the sense that what is allowed to be shown to the Soviet public from abroad will be selected by the Soviet Government to serve its political ends, while what is exported from the Soviet Union will likewise be selected by the Government for the same ends...

...The attending high-powered Russian debating team included Alexei Adzhubei, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's son-in-law and editor of Izvestia...

...Meanwhile, however, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the Italian publisher who first issued Dr...

...She had already (in Stalin's time) been imprisoned for four years and subjected to the strongest pressure to denounce Pasternak...

...According to Moscow radio, the name of the Italian was Benedetti and the parcel contained half a million rubles in 100 ruble notes which had been brought from Italy...

...This secret procedure—although the Soviet authorities have since maintained that the trial was technically not a secret —inevitably evoked memories of the Stalin era and created suspicion of a frame-up...

...Its sentiment was also expressed by a Russian delegate at Wiston House who denounced Hammarskjold as a man "whose name is hateful to the peoples of the entire world," and as "an accomplice and organizer of the murder of Lumumba...

...If it had been a straightforward prosecution with conclusive evidence, the Soviet authorities would have been only too glad for foreign correspondents to attend it...

...Nobody requires him to honor his government, to praise the institutions of his state or to represent the rich and powerful people of his country as essentially virtuous...

...There is no Ivinskaya problem in the Soviet Union," declared Surkov triumphantly...

...There is no way for a Soviet citizen to challenge publicly such a verdict, or for foreign criticism to be conveyed to the Soviet public...

...Among persons acquainted with this background there was an expectation that some move would be made against Ivinskaya...

...At the Wiston House conference the Russians complained that the showing of Soviet films in Britain was not keeping pace with the exhibition of British films in Russia...

...There was much unfavorable comment in the press of Western countries and the Soviet Government found that its devotion to "socialist legality" was being widely questioned...

...Thus, with any British play or film shown in the USSR there is an invisible party propagandist to tell the audience, "Now see for yourselves...

...This is not a matter of anti-Communist prejudice...

...This vividly illustrated Zhukov's contention that "there is nothing more immoral and disgusting than the hypocritical contention that we should for the sake of some abstract 'freedom of information' tolerate the free dissemination of falsehood, slander and subversive propaganda which engender hatred and create quarrels between nations...

...The charge was complicity in an illegal currency exchange transaction whereby she was paid a sum of money from the royalties on sales of Dr...

...Alexei Surkov, head of the Foreign Relations Section of the Union of Soviet Writers...

...and that there should be "an allround expansion of economic, trade, cultural and other contacts between different countries irrespective of their social systems...

...The interest aroused by this case was a continuation of the interest aroused by the circumstances surrounding the original publication of Dr...

...Clearly, to the Soviet Communist mind an attack on the Secretary General—or on President Kennedy or Prime Minister Harold Macmillan or any other non-Communist—is something entirely different from an attack on Khrushchev, and it is impossible even to imagine an agreement under which they could be treated on an equal footing...

...But they can be made aware of the existence of convictions no less strongly held than their own, and of that opposition of reasoned criticism which they never have to face in their own country...

...and Georgy Zhukov, Chairman of the State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries...

...The meeting itself comprised both public and private sessions...

...After she was arrested in August discreet inquiries and pleas for her release were made from several quarters, but it was not until some time after her trial and conviction that there was any public announcement of what had happened to her...

...The Soviet Union is therefore quite willing to increase its import of Western cultural works, provided that it can reserve selection rights...

...Against this background the Russian delegates found that their "proofs" were received with skepticism, and the doubts expressed over the justice of the sentence passed on Ivinskaya appeared to fray their tempers more than any other issue discussed at the conference or in meetings with the press...

...They appeared to be genuinely surprised at the persistence with which they were questioned about it and impressed by the pleas for clemency...

...It was only in response to persistent questioning by foreign correspondents that the fact that she had been tried was at last admitted...

...MEETING AT WISTON HOUSE Russian version of secret Ivinskaya trial dominates Anglo-Soviet conference on cultural exchanges By G. F. Hudson London The British press and public had a unique opportunity recently to hear eminent Soviet personalities explain the famous policy of "peaceful coexistence," and to hear the Russian version of the secret trial of Boris Pasternak's close friend, Olga Ivinskaya...

...An issue which formed no part of the agenda for the Wiston House conference, but nevertheless became very prominent both in private conversations and at the press conferences, was the case of Olga Ivinskaya, the friend of Boris Pasternak who was arrested last August and sentenced in December —in a trial which was in effect a secret one—to eight years imprisonment...

...The Russians removed all doubt of the Kremlin's determination to maintain complete control over what the Soviet citizen may read, hear or see, and to reject any modification of this control as part of the expansion of cultural contacts...

...that these governments should "do everything in their power speedily to arrive at a positive solution of questions pertaining to general and complete disarmament to be implemented under the most strict and effective international control...

...The whole affair indeed remained mysterious and the secrecy of the trial indicated that the authorities had something to hide...

...In return, it wishes to increase the export of works which will help to convince Western audiences of what it wants them to believe...

...Nevertheless, the conference did agree that it was "in the vital interests of the peoples that their governments should take energetic steps to bring about a cardinal improvement in the international situation...

...Zhivago in foreign countries...

...One practical demonstration of Soviet intransigence was that the BBC report (in Russian) of the radio discussion on the British Home Service, which included a short speech by Adzhubei, was jammed for listeners in the Soviet Union...

...On February 23 the Guardian published both cartoons side by side on its front page, and the Russian one was certainly the fiercer of the two...

...the novelist or dramatist can write as he pleases...

...In pursuing this line, the Russian delegates were careful to avoid suggesting that it was the Soviet rulers who feared the effect of Western falsehood...

...But this is not, as Zhukov implied, due either to political motives or to government pressure...

...When Maclean was asked how he understood it, he replied that, judging from Khrushchev's speeches it meant "a struggle between two different systems by all means short of total war...

...This is possible, of course, because of the freedom of Western society...

...Before his death, Pasternak told friends he realized that his own standing as a writer made it inexpedient for the Soviet authorities to apply against him stronger sanctions than expulsion from the Writers' Union, but he feared that after his death they would take their revenge on Ivinskaya for her part in the production and publication of Dr...

...Zhivago and the subsequent persecution of Pasternak...

...Drawn by Herblock, it showed Khrushchev with an axe demolishing the United Nations and saying to Mao Tse-tung: "By the time I've finished with it, it won't be worth belonging to...

...A comparison of what has been shown in Russia with what has been produced in Britain in recent years reveals that Moscow has been careful to choose pieces which are satires on British society...

...it is not we, but the most esteemed Western writers who are teaching you how rotten the West is...

...The British side was headed by Sir William Hayter, a former British Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Sir Fitzroy Maclean, author of Escape to Adventure, who was present at the trial of Nikolai Bukharin...

...There is no prospect that they can be ideologically converted at such meetings...

...Zhukov found this normal capitalist response hard to understand...

...To put the matter somewhat differently, films which are deliberately made with a propagandist intention are seldom satisfactory as entertainment...

...How such a parcel had been conveyed through the Soviet customs was not explained, nor was it explained why, if Benedetti's visit had been observed, he was allowed to leave the Soviet Union before Ivinskaya was arrested...

...It was this last, continually put forward by the Russian delegation in answer to pleas for greater freedom in the exchange of news and ideas, which rendered any genuine discussion of the issue impossible...

...Movie operators in Britain are, as Marxists might expect in a capitalist economy, moved exclusively by considerations of financial profit, and they know that British audiences do not like films that are obviously propagandist...

...Indeed, they claimed that international tension would be increased if Soviet citizens were permitted to listen freely to foreign broadcasts or read foreign books and newspapers because of the indignation they would feel at their contents...

...But only a week previously the Times had reprinted another cartoon, this one from Izvestia, showing UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold with his hands dripping writh blood as the murderer of former Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba...

...Zhivago, made a public statement that he had transmitted money through an agent to Ivinskaya on written instructions from Pasternak...

...The delegates to the Wiston House conference therefore came to England armed with documents, including a signed confession by Ivinskaya, which were supposed to prove her guilt...

...In any event, the Wiston House Conference suggests that it is a good thing for the magnates of Soviet propaganda and culture to be directly confronted at an unofficial level with the plainly expressed thoughts and feelings of well-informed people in the Western democracies...

...It remains to be seen whether these will have any effect in reducing the sentence...

...If such a newspaper were to be seen in the Soviet Union, he went on to say, "we would have to strengthen the guard on the British Embassy to protect it against the just wrath of the Soviet public, who would react in a corresponding manner to such attacks against their Prime Minister...

...And Heinz Schewe, the Moscow correspondent of Die Welt, published an account of the affair which stated that an Italian whom Ivinskaya did not know called at her flat, identified himself as representing Feltrinelli, dumped a parcel on the table and at once departed...

...The cartoon had in fact been reproduced by the Times from the Washington Post...

...The final communique stated that the British were in favor of completely free dissemination of books, newspapers, films and broadcasts as "an inalienable human right and a prerequisite to peace and genuine friendship between peoples," while the Russians favored only the dissemination of such things as were "conducive to the consolidation of peace and friendship between peoples...

...The communique issued after the conference declared that both sides supported the principle of peaceful coexistence "while the ideological struggle continues...

...The Russians considered it axiomatic that the cold war was a Western tactic, that the Soviet Union aims, and has always aimed, at friendship between nations, and that therefore written or spoken words designed to increase international tension could only come from the West...