Word: ehrenburg
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...authors. A writer who had been critical, however, or one who merely failed to pay homage to the dictator, was. denied print, frequently banished to prison camp, sometimes executed. In walking the intellectual tightrope between these extremes, no Soviet writer has been more adroit than Ilya Ehrenburg...
Born in Moscow in 1891 of a well-to-do Jewish family, Ehrenburg was a poet of the long-haired kind before the revolution. During the civil war, he swung in behind Denikin's White Guards and strongly attacked Communism in an early poem. Then, when it appeared that the Bolsheviks were there to stay, he flirted with Trotskyism, dropped it for Bukharinism, and finally in Paris, where in bohemian Montparnasse he kept a step ahead of the consequences of his earlier misjudgments, he became Stalin's advocate...
...Ehrenburg's eulogy of Stalin after the dictator's death was more fulsome than any other. Yet, a few months later, he published a novel called The Thaw which Stalin would never have stood for. In The Thaw the Cynic, not the Idealist, is shown setting the tone of Soviet life, and for the first time in a Communist-printed work, explicit references are made to the melancholy effect on Soviet professional life of Stalin's wide-sweeping 1936-38 purge: characters bemoan the disappearance of families and friends for crimes they did not commit. Last week...
...both sides of the Iron Curtain last week the atmosphere was scented with soft words and occasional gentle deeds. Russian Propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg announced that the Russians are "sick and tired of the cold war" and want to end it. Premier Georgy Malenkov beamed a velvety message to the U.S.: "With all my heart I wish the U.S. people happiness and a peaceful life ... I believe there are no obstacles to the improvement of relations." Radio Moscow even enlivened one broadcast with the long-forbidden "decadent" music of George Gershwin...
...Hungary, the Iron Curtain was raised to permit three western newsmen to attend a "world peace council," and to hear Comrade Journalist Ilya Ehrenburg talk about the "entirely new circumstances" which had caused the Soviet Union to "want to reach an agreement with those who profoundly dislike us." In Italy, Communist Leader. Palmiro Togliatti advocated bringing either the Communists or the left-wing Socialists into the government, talked of "synchronized action between the two great working-class parties." In France, Communist Leader Maurice Thorez, in his first speech to the faithful since his return from 2½ years' medical...