Why they censored Doctor Zhivago

Not hard to see why the Soviet powers cracked down on Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Let me count the whys: First, I'm now reading the very moving section in which Zhivago returns to Moscow after his service as an Army doctor on or near the front on World War (I), and the city is in complete and dire poverty; his wife, Tanya, has arranged for them to rent out most of their house and live in just a few rooms, no servants (well, maybe one?), and most of peoples' lives are consumed by attaining the bare necessities, like firewood. You're a Soviet censor circa 1957; sound too familiar? Ouch. Even so, perhaps they could have tolerated a look pre-Revolutionary poverty, but this section of the novel then moves into the era of the Soviet Revolution, 1918 ff, and things are no better, in fact there's now all kinds of political turmoil, fear of riots in the street, assassinations. No, that's not a view they would tolerate in 1957. Even worse, if we are to accept the hardships of life during a revolution, you can be sure that they would not want the figure of suffering and endurance and ultimate triumph to be a bourgeois well-educated doctor. Strike three. Further, the novel is notable (and disturbing to the Soviets) for what it excludes: there is no depiction at all, let alone a romantic and heroic depiction, of the working classes or the oppressed serfs and peasants. How could Pasternak expect to get away with that - writing a novel about a doctor and part-time poet? Finally, even though a third of the way into the novel Zhivago and his soul-mate Lara have had almost no interactions (amazingly - that's not how I remember the story from first reading), it's OK to write a historical epic but the focus should be on the forces of history (and the triumph of the proletariat), not on love and romance. Strike five, and Pasternak was out. Of course the Soviets were idiots and thugs and Doctor Z is an excellent if not a great novel, but the state censors were so blind to the power of literature to change peoples' lives and raise consciousness and awareness (or maybe they weren't so blind; maybe their oppression was a perverse recognition of the power of literature?) - butMoscow and the USSR would have been a more healthy, stable, and prosperous society if its people had been able to read Doctor Zhivago in 1957.