Did the Communists starve the Nobel-laureate author of Dr Zhivago?
Boris Pasternak, 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 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov after him, was not permitted to leave the USSR to attend the awards ceremony and expect 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 authoritie
