Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...they may very well do just that, by electing a Communist as their President. What would induce a people to take such a step? The Russians have enjoyed unprecedented tastes of freedom over the past few years, and the process began so hopefully, even heroically. Now the descendants of Stalin's victims are poised to welcome as their rulers the heirs of Stalin's politics. Will they do so? Or will they pause at the brink? On the following pages TIME explores the reasons for the trouble in the Russian soul, the fierce campaign for the presidency and what...
...title of the biography indicates, Ehrenburg's life is of so much interest precisely because his loyalties, his principles, are so hard to determine. He was a Jew who prospered during the anti-Semitic Stalin years, while other notable Jewish writers were judicially murdered; he was a poet and novelist who won the Stalin Prize while his personal friends Osip Mandelstam and Isaac Babel were sent to the gulag. Clearly, Ehrenburg was no beacon of conscience...
...namely, that Ehrenburg used his public image as "a harsh spokesman for Soviet interests" as "a cover to pursue his ultimate goal: to challenge the limits of Soviet censorship, revive Russia's connection to European culture, and restore to living memory the names and works of those whom Stalin first killed and then erased from history...
This means that, while he didn't dare speak out on behalf of persecuted writers like Babel, Mandelstam or Anna Akhmatova during the Stalin years, Ehrenburg worked assiduously to resurrect their reputations in the more lenient Khrushchev period. As Rubinstein documents, Ehrenburg used his position as the Soviet writer best known to the Western intelligentsia in order to blackmail the censors: he would repeatedly announce the publication of a controversial book or article, then protest that its failure to appear due to censorship would reflect badly on the Soviet regime in the West...
...also true that Ehrenburg protested the regime's abuses as far as he could without losing his privileged position. He refused to sign the most egregiously pro-Stalin public statements of his fellow writers, worked hard to document the Nazi massacre of Jews despite official Soviet disapproval, and was one of the first public figures to speak out against Stalin after his death, in his novel The Thaw...