Word: ehrenburg
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...career of Author Ilya Ehrenburg, 74, spans the history of modern Russia from Czardom through Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin's years of terror, and the gentler years of the old killer's successors. Ehrenburg managed to survive it all by saying just enough of the right things and keeping a discreet tongue about the wrongs around him. Last week, in the final chapters of his rambling memoirs, People, Years, Life, Ehrenburg reminisced on the darker side of the Stalin...
...convincing me that they were traitors. Sergei Eisenstein [the famous Soviet movie director] told me of his meetings with Stalin, who spoke of the necessity to extol Ivan the Terrible and added that Peter the Great didn't cut off enough heads." Summing up his thoughts about Stalin, Ehrenburg says: "If he just read the list of all his victims, he would not have been able to do anything else...
When one close friend after another was hauled off to his death during the bloody purges of the late 1930s, Ehrenburg never said a word. Nor does he offer a word of reproof today...
...Ehrenburg is at his best when he is simply reporting what he saw. Assigned by Izvestia to cover the Spanish Civil War, he is sharp, biting, witty. He describes how the Anarchists, numbering in the tens of thousands, caused havoc in Republican ranks. Not believing in law, order or discipline, they confiscated all cash in areas they controlled, cut off all medical supplies on the grounds that "nature is a better healer." Ehrenburg showed them Soviet films on proper revolutionary behavior, but the Anarchists laughed in all the wrong places...
...Ehrenburg nevertheless shows flashes of awareness of his-and Communism's -vast errors, and he promises to say more about Stalinism in future volumes...