For four days in October 1958, Boris Pasternak was a Nobel laureate and said he was immensely grateful. On the fifth day the campaign began.

Doctor Zhivago had been rejected by Soviet publishers in 1956 and smuggled to Milan, where it appeared in Italian in November 1957. The CIA, as declassified files confirmed in 2014, later arranged a Russian-language edition handed out at the Brussels World's Fair. Moscow concluded the prize was an American operation. The Union of Soviet Writers expelled him on 27 October. A Komsomol leader compared him to a pig in a public speech. Told that his partner Olga Ivinskaya would suffer if he left the country, Pasternak cabled Stockholm and renounced the award.

He died of lung cancer on 30 May 1960, aged 70. Thousands walked out to Peredelkino for the funeral and recited banned poems at the grave while police photographed them.

His son collected the medal in Stockholm on 9 December 1989.