He started publishing poetry in 1930, as a Komsomol activist and a member of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, who believed that soviet art should be politically committed and pro-communist.

"[3] At the first First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Surkov was the first speaker to be called to rebut the report on poetry delivered by Nikolai Bukharin, who had praised Pasternak.

Surkov claimed that there was no such thing as "abstract craftmanship", that good poetry must have a Bolshevik tinge,[4] and that Pasternak's work was "not a suitable compass point by which to chart our growth.

[8] In March 1947, writing in the magazine Culture and Life, he attacked Pasternak's poetry as "the pose of a recluse living outside time ... (who) speaks with obvious hostility and hatred towards the Soviet Revolution..."[9] In October 1957, after Pasternak had passed a manuscript of his novel Doctor Zhivago to the Italian communist and publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, knowing that it would be banned in the USSR, Surkov travelled to Italy to try to persuade Feltrinelli not to publish it.

When that failed, Surkov held a press conference, on 19 October, claiming that Pasternak had agreed to revise the work after it had been read and criticised by other Soviet writers.

When the whole scandal erupted, Khrushchev summoned Surkov, grabbed him by the collar, shook him fiercely, and gave hima terrible dressing-down for failing to mention that Pasternak was a world-famous author.

"[13] Pasternak's widow, Olga Ivinskaya recalled Surkov's "heavy irony, the leering expression on his face, his whole manner so full of hatefulness and spite that people were quite sickened.