MOSCOW (RIA Novosti political commentator Anatoly Korolyov) - Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) was one of the most prominent figures in Stalin's circle.
A writer, outstanding journalist, diplomat, public figure and poet, he rode to the top on the wave of the Russian revolution and lived a life on the razor's edge.
He was probably the only writer who lived independently in a society morally crushed by terror. He lived expansively, collecting pipes and avant-garde painting, and counted Pablo Picasso among his friends.
Stalin used him as an effective screen of the feigned freedom, showed him to the West, and Ehrenburg knew very well how illusory his life in the Soviet Union was. When the Nazis attacked in 1941, Ehrenburg could at long last speak his mind about one of the crucial issues of modernity.
Ehrenburg hated fascism, and saw before many others that proletarian solidarity should be done away with, that the ideas of the Communist International were dead. Ehrenburg was the first to say, Kill the German! And he led Russian society's turn towards a merciless war.
When Germany first attacked the Soviet Union, the men and officers of the Red Army waited naively for German soldiers of working stock to take the side of the Soviet Union and turn on the German capitalists and Hitler's Nazi clique.
Ehrenburg poured cold water on that illusion.
But hatred is a dangerous thing, and fanning hatred doubly so. From the modern viewpoint, Ehrenburg's slogans "The German is an animal" and "Don't spare even the unborn fascists" sound too harsh. But they were engendered by the inhuman nature of that war of extermination, on both sides. So he was absolutely right in the conditions of his time.
Ehrenburg's slogans were one more weapon in the victory over fascism, just like tanks, guns and aircraft.
But the role Ehrenburg played in the Jewish Antifascist Committee raises many questions. On the one hand, after the war he and Vasily Grossman authored the aborted "Black Paper" on the extermination of Jews in occupied Soviet territories (the paper was destroyed).
On the other hand, he wrote the notorious article published by the newspaper Pravda on September 21, 1948, for the visit of Zionist leader Golda Meir. In it, he claimed that Jews were not a nation and were doomed to full assimilation in their countries of residence, above all the Soviet Union.
Ehrenburg was a major figure, and his article provoked panic among Jews in the Soviet Union and America. Polish Jewish journalist Girsh Smolyar recalled that he saw a pile of letters on Ehrenburg's table, "an endless wail about anti-Jewish sentiments in the Soviet Union."
But Ehrenburg was playing a dangerous game of survival at all costs. He knew that Stalin had decided to destroy the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC), which had grown into an influential public force. The great actor and Jewish leader Solomon Mikhoels was killed in January 1948, and Ehrenburg took over his uncrowned leadership, which was extremely dangerous.
The death of Mikhoels was the beginning of the liquidation of JAC leadership, which ended in the hair-raising verdict of 1952. Thirteen prominent Soviet Jews were sentenced to be shot, including Solomon Lozovsky, Joseph Yuzufovich, Boris Shimeliovich, Benjamin Zuskin, the writers and poets David Bergelson, Peretz Markish, Leib Kvitko, Itzik Feffer, and David Hoffstein.
But the brightest star of them all, Ilya Ehrenburg, was not on the black list. He was not even arrested and continued to live his flamboyant lifestyle. Why did not Stalin kill him? This remains unsolved. Ehrenburg wrote that he survived because it was "a lottery."
Moreover, he continued to assure the West that the executed Jewish writers were still alive and working fruitfully, as Gregor Aronson, an expert on the "Jewish question" in the Stalin era, reported.
Ehrenburg knew very well why the despot let him live. In 1953, when the "doctors' plot" was exposed (Jewish doctors were accused of plotting against the country's leadership), Stalin demanded that the remaining Jews sign a servile letter to Pravda approving the government's action and denouncing the intrigues of "bourgeois nationalists."
All the Jewish stars of Soviet culture and science signed the letter, including the film director Mikhail Romm, the violinist David Oistrakh, the poet Samuil Marshak, the physicist Lev Landau, the pianist Emil Gilels, and many others.
But Ehrenburg refused to comply, and did this in a highly ingenious way, a miracle of survivor psychology.
He wrote a personal letter to Stalin, asking his advice and saying that the letter he had been asked to sign could be misinterpreted "by enemies of the Homeland," and that he himself "could not decide what to do." But if "comrades tell me that my signature is desirable and would be useful for the protection of the Homeland and for the peace movement, I will sign [the letter] immediately."
That brilliant example of casuistry was designed to befuddle Stalin. An expert on the mechanism of tyrannical bureaucracy, Ehrenburg knew that his letter would get stuck in the corridors of power, provoking a wave of discussions, visas, telephone conversations and letters. He knew that it would be retyped, stamped and signed by all manner of bureaucrats and would eventually become hopelessly outdated, because even Soviet politics move fast. And he knew that his question would remain unanswered.
After the death of the tyrant and the fall of Stalinism, Ehrenburg wrote two brilliant books, a long story "The Thaw," which provided an apt name for the new era, and a multi-volume book of memoirs, "People, Years, Life," in which he wrote very frankly about himself and his time.
Those memoirs were his repentance and confession.
