There is no reason to be nostalgic about the Cold War nightmare of a thermonuclear Armageddon, superpower proxy wars across the Third World, the Soviet gulag, the censorship imposed throughout the communist bloc, or the opportunistic witch-hunting of the McCarthy period in America.

Yet, there is something quaint about the revelation that the CIA had Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago surreptitiously published in Russian to boost his chances of winning the 1958 Nobel Prize in literature. A forthcoming book about the Doctor Zhivago affair by Ivan Tolstoy — yes, a member of that illustrious literary family — recalls a bygone era when even CIA and the KGB spies respected the power of literature.

Doctor Zhivago was literature, not propaganda. The Soviet foreign minister of the time was unwittingly bestowing the highest praise on Pasternak’s work when he decried its “estrangement from Soviet life” and its “celebration of individualism.” That vehement, jargon-laden denunciation evokes a time when a novel by the poet Pasternak truly mattered.

Today, Russians are reading the same airport ephemera that Americans read and, instead of publishing literary works, intelligence agents are monitoring the snuff videos of Al Qaeda fanatics.