Word: stalinization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Brink of Vows. Ehrenburg's compromises came all the harder because he was, in many ways, a Western intellectual, steeped in European thought and experience; he knew what the world was like before Communism and beyond Stalin. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1891, he early migrated to Paris' Left Bank and the bohemian life of a young poet trying to recapture in lyrical verse the "beauty of the vanished world" of medievalism...
...went on to use the same skills in covering the war with the Nazis. He helped deify Stalin, inspiring the Russian fighting men with such dispatches as one beginning: "I can hear the voice of Stalin day and night...
With the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet political climate inevitably began to change-and Ehrenburg was the first to dramatize the fact. His novel, The Thaw, gave its name to the new era. It frankly dealt with Stalin's purges and other heretofore taboo subjects, and helped open the way for the Evtushenkos and the Dudintsevs (Not By Bread Alone) to follow...
Senior Citizen. Thereafter, Ehrenburg was as ardent an advocate of greater freedom of expression within the Soviet Union as he had been an acquiescent promoter of Stalin. In one of the final chapters of his diffuse six-volume memoirs he even backtracked: the voice of Stalin he had once heard became ominous "noises on the stairs"-meaning the approach of the secret police. "If he just read the list of all his victims," he said of the old dictator, "he would not have been able to do anything else...
Khrushchev found Ehrenburg a little too outspoken and said so; but Ehrenburg, now a secure senior citizen of the Soviet literary establishment, with a five-room luxury apartment in Moscow filled with modern French art, paid no heed. Ehrenburg always insisted he had not bought his immunity under Stalin. "I lived in an era when the fate of man resembled not so much a chess game as a lottery," he said. Last week, at the age of 76, the last lottery brought down the professional survivor: he died of a heart attack in Moscow...